SYDNEY — When a coronavirus outbreak sent Sydney screeching into lockdown six weeks ago, Hannah Gee suddenly had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Covid updates filled the void.
“I’d have the news on all day, often multiple press conferences at once,” said the 30-year-old graduate student, who is between semesters.
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But then something unexpected happened. Gee, who doesn’t usually watch television let alone sports, became obsessed with the Olympics. Pandemic news conferences gave way to karate kumite and canoe sprints.
“The Olympics have definitely replaced a lot of that doom scrolling,” she said.
As the Games wound down over the weekend, however, Gee could feel the doom seeping back in.
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“I’m not really sure what to do with myself,” she said on Monday. “I feel a bit empty inside.”
In Sydney’s sprint against a delta outbreak, outcome rests on the young
The Olympics have provided the world with a much-needed distraction from the pandemic. Yet, few countries embraced the Games as intensely, even desperately, as Australia.
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The sports-obsessed nation has long taken the Summer Olympics seriously. But with roughly half of the country locked down because of outbreaks of the delta variant, Australians were a captive audience this time. While viewership slumped in the United States, it was four times higher than anticipated in Australia.
“We can’t go anywhere,” said Geoff Wynn, who lives in Sydney’s Canterbury-Bankstown area, the current epicenter of the outbreak and one of several regions where restrictions are especially tight. “I’ve got a nice bonsai collection and I’ve been watching the Olympics pretty much 24/7.”
Wynn has loved the Olympics since watching Mark Spitz swim to seven golds in 1972. Recently retired, the 59-year-old was always going to increase his Olympic intake. A one-hour time difference between Tokyo and Sydney helped, as did Australia’s record-tying 17 gold medals.
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Like many Australians, he found the Olympics an uplifting diversion from his country’s dark moment.
Six months ago, Australia seemed comfortably ahead of the coronavirus. Strict border and quarantine rules combined with snap lockdowns had successfully beaten back several small outbreaks. Then came the highly transmissible delta variant, and a slow response from officials in Sydney — combined with a sluggish national vaccination campaign — gave the virus an opening.
As Australia’s outbreak grows, so does covid shaming
Sydney went into lockdown in late June at a cost of roughly $750 million per week. With other large cities going in and out of shutdown, the country is now facing the possibility of plunging back into another covid recession, having climbed out of one in December.
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“This time is definitely different,” Wynn said. “There is a general malaise.”
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The Olympics had briefly lifted that malaise, like sunshine burning fog off Sydney Harbor, only for the gloom to return as the Games ended.
“Everyone is in the mind-set of, ‘Bloody hell, what do we do now?’” he said. “There is nothing on the horizon, on the hope side of things. You can’t say we’re all going to get vaccinated because that’s months away.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has tried to harness the country’s Olympic spirit, telling Australians to “go for gold on getting those vaccination rates where we need to go.”
But that messaging hasn’t gone down well in Liverpool, another hard-hit suburb in southwestern Sydney, where cases have been high but vaccination rates are among the lowest in New South Wales, said city councilor Nathan Hagarty.
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Locals felt aggrieved when they were hit with police patrols and then additional restrictions, despite the outbreak starting in the city’s wealthier eastern suburbs, Hagarty said. Meanwhile, state and federal leaders have used covid news conferences to trade snarky takedowns.
“Up until this point that was something we only saw in sport,” he said. “It’s left the sporting field and become very toxic.”
The Olympics were a breath of fresh air, especially Australian runner Peter Bol, whose family fled war-torn Sudan when he was a child. For diverse neighborhoods like Liverpool, where sports help refugees assimilate, Bol’s journey to the 800-meter finals was an affirmation of immigrants’ place in Australia.
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“This is the one thing that we’ve all been able to rally behind,” Hagarty said of the Games. “What do we do when the Olympics are over? We need something to fill that void, just for our sanity.”
It’s not just Sydney that was saved by the Olympics. Melbourne, where residents endured a four-month lockdown last year, was nearing the end of its fifth lockdown when the Games began. When the restrictions lifted a few days later, people rushed to bars and restaurants to watch, only for another delta outbreak to swiftly spark shutdown No. 6.
Melbourne plunges back into coronavirus lockdown a week after leaving it
Suzie Reichman was on a work Zoom call when her husband appeared behind her laptop, silently mouthing that the city was going back into lockdown in a few hours.
Reichman, a 47-year-old scientist who studies pollution, cracked open a can of tomato soup and baked a sheet of scones as comfort food. Then the family sat on the couch and watched the Olympics.
Her daughter got so into the Games that Reichman had to outlaw Olympics coverage until the elementary school student had finished her remote work. Tokyo provided the family with a routine that helped distract from the dread of another lockdown. Before going to bed each night, her daughter would ask for an update on Australia’s medals and upcoming events.
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“Except for the athletes wearing masks, and the fact that there is no audience, it’s like any other Olympics,” Reichman said. “It seems very normal in this very abnormal time that we are all in.”
For Gee, watching the athletes come together from across the globe felt like a glimpse of a post-pandemic future that still seems far off in Sydney. She hadn’t planned on getting into the Olympics. But then she found herself sucked into events she hardly knew existed, like sport climbing. Soon she was spending 20 minutes each night creating detailed schedules of the next day’s competitions.
“I’m glued to it,” she said last week. “It’s embarrassing to admit. I watch on my laptop while I cook or on my phone while I’m on a walk. I’ve taken it into the bathroom with me. Sometimes I take it into bed with me until I fall asleep.”
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As Sunday’s Closing Ceremonies drew closer, Gee could feel her covid anxiety creep back in. And on Monday morning, without the Olympics to distract her, she again tuned into Sydney’s daily covid news conference to hear there were 283 additional cases.
“I’m back on that grind now,” Gee said with a sigh. She is counting down the days until Aug. 24, when a note on her calendar reads: “Paralympics start.”
Melbourne plunges back into coronavirus lockdown a week after leaving it
In Sydney’s sprint against a delta outbreak, outcome rests on the young
As Australia’s outbreak grows, so does covid shaming