HERE IS A question for future pub quizzes: in which year were the 2020
Olympics held in Tokyo? An easy one—the answer is 2021. What about Expo
2020 in Dubai? An answer of 2021 would score a point, but so would 2022; it
runs from October to March. How about Miss America 2020? That is a trick
question. The event took place in December 2019, before coronavirus turned
the world upside down. It is Miss America 2021 that has been cancelled.
Many other annual events will try to pick up where they left off in 2019. But organisers
of less regular events are hoping to go ahead with the ones postponed from 2020, and
hope the punters will put up with outdated merchandise. Some, such as Euro 2020, a
quadrennial football tournament, have retained the same name. UEFA, the European
football confederation, says this is “to keep the original vision of the tournament” and to
“serve as a reminder of how the whole football family came together”. But it admits thatlot of branded material had already been produced.” The same considerations no
doubt apply to Expo 2020 and the 2020 Olympics.
A sense of déjà vu is already setting in, and 2021 has not even started yet. In July 2019
Tokyo held a celebration to mark the one-year countdown to its big Olympic moment.
There were fireworks, celebrities and an unveiling of the medals to be awarded at the
games the following year. But the only thing that happened 366 days later was a 15-
minute event in an empty stadium to mark, well, another year to the 2020 Olympics.
Call it a twice-in-a-lifetime experience.
In cricket, the 2020 Twenty20 World Cup has been moved to 2021, causing anguish to
fans of linguistic reduplication everywhere (Twenty20 is a shortened form of the game
involving 20 overs for each team). Worse still, the original 2020 Twenty20, which was
to have been played in Australia, will be held in India instead—whereas the 2021 series,
to have been played in India, will occur in Australia in 2022. It is almost as confusing as
the rules of cricket. Almost.
Live music has been affected, too. Among the many stars who have had to postpone
tours by a year are Pearl Jam, Green Day and Alanis Morissette, on her “Jagged Little Pill”
25th-anniversary tour. As if switching between 2020 and 2021 were not taxing enough,
it is strange to be reminded that some people still live in 1995. Meanwhile, on the Isle of
Wight, a quirky English holiday spot and festival venue, the “Experience 1970 Festival”
was postponed, too—proving that time travel never quite works out as intended.
It is not just fun stuff that has been put off to a later date. The 2nd Global Policy Forum
on Memory of the World, which was originally scheduled for May 2020, has been
postponed—no one can say until when. An interdisciplinary conference on “Confronting
Evil”, planned for June 2020, is “under review”.
Then there is politics, which never stops. Londoners who had hoped to ignore the 2020
mayoral elections will now have to extend their apathy for a further year. Hong Kongers
preparing to vote in the city’s legislative-council elections will have had a particularly
rough 12 months in which to make up their minds. And Somalis, having gone 51 years
without elections based on the universal franchise, will have to wait yet another year.
No doubt 2020 will be chiefly remembered for the onset of the covid-19 pandemic. Yet
here, too, the year gets short shrift. Like the absent father whose only contribution is
one night of transmission and a surname, 2019 escaped the consequences, but left
behind its legacy: covid-19 is so named because it was brought to the World Health
Organisation’s attention on the last day of that year.