Shortly after the opening of the Tokyo Olympic Games, the Pope expressed his hope that, in this time of pandemic, the Olympiad would be «a sign of hope and universal brotherhood in the name of a honest competition».
And indeed, this event has provoked strong emotions and has told many stories of men and women of distant countries making gestures whose value goes far beyond the sporting performance and, as well, of countries witnessing the hope and universal brotherhood desired by the Pope. We like to mention some of them.
The athletes from South Sudan (a poor country with serious internal conflicts), due to the health emergency, have remained in Japan for another year, thanks to a money collected by the citizens of Maebashi. The South African Dallas Oberholzer, competing in skateboarding, began training during the apartheid years and, in his country, he still uses the skate to gather and train children in difficult neighborhoods and keep them away from drugs and gangs. Several athletes won medals in the name of countries that welcomed them as refugees or immigrants showing their great integration and identification with the country and a great willpower; among them, we remember the Italian sprinter Fausto Desalu, son of a Nigerian woman who raised him alone working as a caregiver in Italy; the family where she works, shared the joy of her son’s victory.
In the Tokyo Olympics, even small states such as Bermuda, Puerto Rico and San Marino, showed their value winning medals for the first time and therefore, in a certain sense, the Games, redesigned the geography of the world sport competition
And for the first time, as a sign of hope, in the Games participated a national team that does not represent a country but the over 82 million people, forced to leave their homes because of the discrimination or wars: the national team of the refugees that, in the real life, often ‘had to run an obstacle marathon’ persecuted by wars and dictatorships and they brought a living sign of hope for the world.