Tokyo’s ‘grand human opera’: a tonic for a weary world

Despite widespread ambivalence and fear, the Olympic Games managed to bring us together and lift our spirits

The flag bearers at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games
The flag bearers at the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games
(Image credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

Postponed for a year and then playing to empty stadiums: this was in many ways a downbeat Olympics, said Ben Bloom in The Daily Telegraph. But it was a bumper one where Team GB was concerned. Its haul of 65 medals – equalling its tally at the 2012 London Games and just two short of the 67 won in Rio in 2016 – far exceeded expectations. In the final week, the medals had kept on coming: there was a gold apiece for husband-and-wife Laura and Jason Kenny, the “golden couple” of British cycling (with his victory in the keirin event, Jason became Britain’s most decorated Olympian ever, with seven gold medals to his name). There were golds in both the women and men’s modern pentathlon. And Tom Daley won his second medal of the games with a bronze in the 10-metre platform.

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