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Vaccines against COVID-19 will not be mandatory
for athletes and team staff at the Games, but Dick Pound, a
Canadian and the longest-serving member of the International
Olympic Committee (IOC), has said athletes should be given
priority for the Olympics to take place as planned.
The IOC has said it is against athletes skipping lines in their
countries, while the Canadian Olympic Committee has said it was
preparing for the Tokyo Games under the assumption vaccines
might not be widely available to its athletes before they open
on July 23.
"We really need the vaccine to get into the arms of the people
who are most at risk, those in long-term care homes, those in
the front lines," Canadian wrestler Erica Wiebe, the reigning
Olympic champion in the 75kg class, told Reuters.
Wiebe, who travelled to Serbia last month for the Individual
World Cup after the longest competition hiatus of her career,
said her participation in the Tokyo Games did not depend on
being vaccinated, even though her sport requires close contact
with other competitors.
Some countries have already begun vaccinating athletes or plan
to inoculate their Olympic delegations before the Games.
Israel's Olympic Committee said on Wednesday it had already
inoculated half its Olympic delegation and would complete the
process by the end of May.
In Canada, racewalker Evan Dunfee worries that if athletes were
to be given priority, it "would sour public opinion and just
turn the community against us."
"I think we'd come home from those Games and really be limited
in our ability to use the power of sport to lift people up, to
inspire and to be role models," said Dunfee, who finished fourth
in the 50km event at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Dunfee doesn't expect his turn to be vaccinated to come before
June or July, a time when he would normally be training at
altitude in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in the immediate run-up to
the Games.
He said that if his training went according to plan, there was a
good chance he would not be vaccinated before the Olympics.
"Our value as athletes is only as strong as our community," he
said. "We're nothing without our communities."
(Reporting by Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber; Editing by Raissa
Kasolowsky)
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