Local Olympian Stephen Tomasin trying to tune out COVID-19 concerns in Tokyo

After being postponed for a year and scrutinized every step of the way, the world’s grandest sporting event formally kicked off Friday in Tokyo — live at 4 a.m. here, for the hardy or insomniac.

For Santa Rosa native Stephen Tomasin, the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics will represent the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy, made possible by eight years of relentless effort.

“I’ve been with the team since I was 18 years old,” said Tomasin, now 26 and a member of the U.S. Men’s Rugby Sevens Team. “My entire adult life, I’ve been chasing this dream, chasing this jersey, trying to push forth rugby in the U.S. Being selected to the team, then actually getting on a plane and coming here — it’s more than I thought it would be, to be honest.”

But also less. The Tokyo Games will offer all the expected athletic grace and power, but the event will be diminished in ways never seen before. The competitors will be discouraged from casual mixing, arenas and stadiums will be devoid of fans, and the action is taking place against a backdrop of worry as the coronavirus continues to mutate and thrive.

As of Thursday, at least 91 people with Olympic credentials had tested positive for the virus in Japan, a figure that does not include those who tested positive before arrival. At least 10 of the confirmed cases are among athletes.

Even before those test results, deep skepticism reigned among public health experts. They question the wisdom of gathering tens of thousands of people from all over the planet, putting various combinations of them in close proximity for two weeks, then dispatching them back to their home countries, many of which have low vaccination rates.

“The risks were foreseeable and the (International Olympic Committee) was forewarned,” Icahn School of Medicine’s Dr. Annie Sparrow said in an email. “This was a huge opportunity to help define what it means to apply scientific public interest at scale in order to uphold the Olympics. Yet the IOC’s approach is neither informed by science nor best practice. While risk is not 100% avoidable, many more steps could have been taken in relation to risk mitigation that the IOC has chosen to disregard.”

Sparrow was the lead writer of a paper, published July 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine, that called out the IOC playbooks guiding participant behavior, saying they “fail to consider the ways in which exposure occurs, the factors that contribute to exposure, and which participants may be at highest risk.”

No one is more suspicious than a Japanese populace that had once been counted on to embrace the Games. An Ipsos Global Advisor poll released July 13 showed that 78% of Japanese respondents believe the Olympics should be postponed or canceled. The Tokyo Medical Practitioners’ Association wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Olympic organizers in May, urging them to scrap the event, while Hiroshi Mikitani, founder of the online retail giant Rakuten, called the Summer Games a “suicide mission.”

The sentiment is understandable. Tokyo is currently under a state of emergency because of rising coronavirus rates. The city reported nearly 2,000 new cases Thursday, its highest one-day increase since January. And Japan’s rate of full vaccination is perilously low, at about 23%.

Tomasin is not unaware of this commotion, but he has gotten pretty good at tuning it out.

“Any energy spent worrying about something not directly helping our team is counterproductive,” he said. “There are headlines popping up every day. And honestly, I see them and I’m like, whatever.”

Those empty seats will be hard to ignore, though. The U.S. Men’s Rugby Team is accustomed to playing in front of crowds ranging from 25,000 to 80,000 people, Tomasin said. “We have tournaments where it’s 65,000-70,000 strong for three days. Now it will be Tokyo Stadium, a 45,000-seat stadium, and not a seat will be filled,” he said. “It’s obviously disappointing.”

The opening ceremony is an outlier. Organizers are allowing a modest 950 spectators into the venue for the spectacle. That scaled-down event will be the cruelest twist for the participants, according to one veteran Olympian.

“When I think about my Olympic experiences, the single thing that sticks out the most, my favorite moment of all, was entering the stadium in London, with 80,000 people packed in the stands,” said Kim Conley, a Santa Rosa native who ran the 5,000 meters in England in 2012, and again at Rio de Janeiro in 2016. “It was so loud. It's a shame those athletes won’t experience the excitement of that packed crowd.”

Tomasin is used to adapting by now, though. The pandemic has affected nearly everything he has done since it ground everything to a halt in March 2020.

That includes the IOC’s begrudging postponement of these Summer Games, originally scheduled for 2020. Tomasin’s rugby team regrouped in Chula Vista, site of the U.S. Olympic Training Center, in September, and has been working out together ever since.

Tomasin rented a condominium in San Diego with two teammates and bought home gym equipment. His world, as he put it, was “basically training to home and home to training.”

The rugby squad finally got clearance to travel in February, for a tournament in Madrid. Tomasin stayed home. A few days before departure, his girlfriend had come down with COVID-19, a disqualification for the athlete. Tomasin eluded the virus, and went to England for a tournament in late April.

No one contracted COVID-19 with the men’s rugby team during the pandemic, Tomasin said, though “a couple guys” tested positive at home while the team was traveling. All but a handful of those associated with the squad are vaccinated, he believes. But the IOC isn’t requiring anyone at the Summer Olympics to be immunized.

The men’s rugby team decamped at the Olympic Village on Thursday, in anticipation of the opening ceremony and its first scheduled matches, against Kenya and Ireland on Monday.

Before that, they and the U.S. Women’s Rugby Team had lived and trained at a resort hotel outside of a small town called Mimasaka, in the center of the island of Honshu and about 400 miles from Tokyo. The players were all tested for the virus immediately upon landing in Osaka, and waited several hours at the airport to get clearance. Everyone is tested daily in Japan.

Tomasin has elected to place his confidence in event organizers.

“I look at all the precautionary measures the Olympic committee had put in place,” he said. “If they say they’re taking care of you and everything will be OK, you have to trust them.”

Conley agrees, sort of.

“You could have a pessimistic angle, that the IOC is not as concerned for safety as it is for optics,” said Conley, who currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona. “But in the end, there might not be much difference. If they want the optics to be good, they have to keep the athletes safe.”

Certainly, that will be a challenge now that the competition is underway. Critics wonder if the Games will continue if an outbreak occurs in Olympic Village, or if whole teams are unable to participate because they are quarantined.

Conley, who does committee work with USA Track & Field and was involved in designing safety protocols for the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials in Oregon, has some insight. And she thinks the odds are good for a full slate of action.

“I’ve been having that debate with my husband, and with my agent,” she said. “My experience at this stage of the sport, I really believe in the weight and power of NBC. I think a TV-friendly version of the Games will go on.”

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.

Editor’s Note: This story has been revised to say that Tomasin is from Santa Rosa.