If you think back to the day Americans first realized “our lives were going to fundamentally change for awhile”, said John Oliver on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, it probably involved sports. It was likely to be either the day the Utah Jazz all-star Rudy Gobert jokingly rubbed his hands over reporters’ microphones, mocking the threat of coronavirus, or when, two days later, Gobert and his teammates tested positive for the virus and the NBA season was abruptly and indefinitely suspended.
Since then, sporting events have essentially evaporated; the NHL, MLB and international soccer leagues suspended seasons, while the 2020 Olympics postponed until summer 2021. The loss of all sports was unprecedented, but “as shocking as these cancellations seemed at the time, the truth is there was really no choice,” Oliver said. “Sporting events with large crowds packed together are the exact opposite of social distancing and the nightmare scenario during a pandemic.”
But as the pandemic and shutdowns have worn on, calls to restart sports, whose cancellation Oliver called “emphatically the right thing to do”, have increased, especially from the top. In April, Oliver reminded, President Trump told reporters: “We have to get our sports back. I’m tired of watching baseball games that are 14 years old, but I haven’t actually had too much time to watch … I would say maybe I watch one batter and then I get back to work.”
“We actually asked some experts about that,” Oliver deadpanned, “and it turns out that when the country’s in the middle of a pandemic that’s killing many thousands of Americans every single week, the correct number of batters from 2006 for the president to be watching is actually fucking zero.”
That fact aside, Oliver continued, Trump was “not entirely wrong there” as the lack of sports is an emotional and financial blow to many; by one estimate, sports-related cancellations will erase $12bn in revenue and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the US, which is devastating for stadium cooks, maintenance workers, ticket processors and others who depend on sporting events for work.
Oliver’s main question, then, was what a path to restarting sports safely would look like, if it could be done at all. There are already examples of how to not take safety into consideration. Oliver pointed to the WWE, which has resumed filming in Florida – a state which designated professional sports and events televised for a national audience “essential services” as long as they were closed to the public – despite formal complaints from production staff that their jobs could not follow proper distancing guidelines. The UFC president, Dana White, promised a private Caribbean island of UFC fighters called “Fight Island”, which is a “perfect name”, said Oliver, because “it’s the first thought an idiot would have if they wanted to name a private island where fights happen.” But just a day before the event, one of its fighters had to pull out after he and two of his cornermen tested positive. Which underscores how “if you want to come back completely without risk, that’s just not possible right now,” Oliver said.
And yet many sports organizations are under pressure to return, as “profit is a powerful motivator here, especially for some team owners who won’t be the ones taking the risk,” Oliver explained. “And it’s why major sports like baseball and football are so eagerly pursuing plans to come back. But assuming that you can’t just stage all events in Jacksonville or on some stupidly named island somewhere, how do you do it in the safest possible way?”
One popular idea is the so-called “bubble leagues”, in which athletes play sports before empty stadiums, but Oliver essentially debunked the idea as too damned by its details. “When you think about that for more than a second, it all becomes much, much more complicated because, of course, you wouldn’t just be isolating players,” he explained – it also means testing and isolating the coaching staff, team physicians, umpires and clubhouse managers, camera crews and hotel staff, among others.
The complications and quarantine-based separations from family are why many MLB players have resisted an idea of a bubble league, leading the MLB to walk back a proposed return in Arizona. A good plan has yet to be proposed; one league official told the Washington Post “I would be lying if we were to say we have a good idea …they’re all degrees of bad.”
“And that is true of so many current proposals for sports to come back,” said Oliver. “The second you start reading the details of any plan, it automatically becomes ridiculous.
“So as hard as it is to hear, we might need a little more time to make sure we get this right – phasing sports back in slowly with tailored approaches that take into account each sport’s level of contact and robust systems of testing and tracing,” Oliver added. So to fill the absence in the meantime, he proposed something “with an existing infrastructure, a schedule of heart-pounding events, a passionate fanbase and no human contact”: competitive marble racing.
Last Week Tonight, he revealed, is sponsoring Jelle’s Marble Runs, a Dutch competitive marble racing league (think marbles careening through sand tunnels, or down a track in front of a marble-packed “stadium”) whose all-star tournament, the 2020 Marble Games, begins in June and is, according to Oliver, “to put it mildly, absolutely fantastic”.
