Sweden lights up in a dark Olympics that shouldn’t have started

Not just for the worst Swedish Olympic start since 2004 in Athens or because it pretty much happens when we dream with John Blonde and not for Olympic gold with Miraitowa and Someity, the Olympic mascot.

But also because the Olympics should never have been arranged, and should have gone further when the Covid-19 pandemic casts a dark shadow over them with empty seats, weird award ceremonies, and dissident or sick athletes. While the number of new cases of the virus in Tokyo, 3,177, yesterday was the highest daily number since the epidemic began, of which 169 cases are linked to the Olympics.

Because for all the accomplishments behind the mouth guards, it would never be real without the crowd partying in the stands, Games Fuel, where every four years young athletes’ opportunity to appear, spanning “15 Minutes of Fame”, now stops at the TV or computer screen and makes Japanese athletes compete in their Olympics in front of zero spectators.

It also doesn’t get any better than Discovery plus, to say the least, clumsy broadcasts with persistent technical issues, bad sync and – feedback from one ping-pong match but photos from another!

Eight medals – that was definitely SOK’s goal for Tokyo.

138 athletes in 23 different sports got the chance, but so far, rookie Swedes, painted as jumping on medals, have lined up to check in on the failure streak with the flight back straight to Sweden.

The last judokas were Anna Bernholm, Marcus Niemann, Tommy Macias and Ruben Pasek, all jumping with medals, but no one made it to the quarter-finals.

– It might be now or never. We didn’t work here, so damn it if we did,” Robert Ericsson, national team manager, told TT.

It seems never…

Before that, Swedish world skeet superstar Stefan Nilsson hit, Jenny Resveds failed to defend the Olympic gold medal in mountain biking, and Sarah Sjostrom, for obvious reasons, was unable to catch the butterfly after injuring her elbow. While Halmstads BMK’s Felix Bierstedt must be approved for his Olympic debut

In addition, Matthias Falk of Halmstad BTK, who reached the final of the 2019 World Cup, was a huge jump in the Swedish medal in table tennis and everyone talked about the quarter against China’s Ma Long.

The problem was that before that, old fellow Omar Al-Assar was waiting and in the victory of Chuang-Chih-Yuan, Taiwan. But the matter came to a halt after Matthias invited the Egyptian into the duels of his favorite team – Omar, who can now meet Ma Long instead.

So the cliché “take one game at a time” has rarely been more justified.

Well, some of Sweden’s biggest medal chances are still, of course, like Armand Duplantis, Daniel Ståhl and Sarah Sjöström in freestyle, Walker Perseus Karlström and Sofia Mattson in wrestling, the national equestrian team, and Oscar Rosenberg Hallberg in skateboarding.

Thus, team sports on the women’s side are of course the great light in the Olympic darkness thus far, with both the national soccer and handball teams so impressed that you have high hopes for a medal.

Where we have Jim Gottfriedsson, Andreas Baleka and the handball masters is more blurred, although it wouldn’t be surprising if the team ended up despite at least a bumpy start, turning 29-25 29-28 in the last minute against Portugal and another. (unnecessary) Thriller movie.

By the way, it was part of my Olympic night when I decided to turn the clock.

After several hours paddling without even Ukraine as a blue-yellow element, Eric Pearson managed to break into last place in the 200m breaststroke, judoka Marcus Niemann won his first match at Ippon and then still came out.

On the other Discovery plus channels I also had to choose from Great Britain and India field hockey, softball, street basketball and rugby, but inexplicably stuck to surfing, which is really a long wait for the seventh wave.

But on Friday, athletics enters the ring. Then the Olympics really begin. Although a glowing 100m final or a world record attempt by Armand Duplantis in front of empty stands would feel – just weird and wrong.

It was a direct cheat screening for Halmstad PTK’s top singles table tennis hopeful, Matthias Falk, who now instead has to reload for team competition. Meanwhile, the women’s national soccer and handball teams sailed with a new big medal leap into the Swedish Olympic darkness thus far.