The year of deja Vu

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2 years ago

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hope the punters will put up with outdated merchandise.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.

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