The Netherlands team has avoided handshakes with competitors at the Olympics. Aijaz Rahi/Associated Press
By Rory Smith, Talya Minsberg and Jenny Vrentas
Reporting from a safe distance in Paris, Colombes and Nanterre, France
Aug. 8, 2024
Duco Telgenkamp came to the Paris Olympics with his strategy clear in his mind. The keys, he knew, were to be decisive and clear and, above all, to go early. “You have to get your move in first,” he said. “You have to give people a sign it will be a fist bump.”
The assertiveness is necessary. Like all athletes and staff members in the Netherlands’ Olympic delegation, Telgenkamp, a member of his country’s field hockey team, was told before arriving in Paris that handshakes, high-fives and hugs were forbidden. Official team policy held that the fist bump was the only permissible physical greeting.
The Dutch approach is, of course, a legacy of the one word that nobody involved with the Paris Games likes to mention: coronavirus. Pandemic-era restrictions hollowed out the last two editions of the Games, in Tokyo in 2021 and Beijing a year later. Paris styled itself as the moment the Olympic flame could at last be — safely — reignited.
For fans, that has meant packed stands and a carnival-like atmosphere. For athletes, it has meant a completely different experience from the ones in Japan and China, where bubbles were imposed to allow the events to take place.
During the Games in Tokyo, athletes often competed in empty stadiums. Doug Mills/The New York Times
After qualifying for those Games, athletes had to successfully navigate a bureaucratic Covid maze. They needed multiple negative tests from specific clinics, an endless stack of paperwork, a health-tracking app on their phones and a flurry of QR codes to present to officials upon arrival.
In Tokyo, athletes, visiting officials and members of the news media were tested for Covid every four days. In Beijing, everyone was tested daily. The only time athletes were unmasked was during competition, and even then their time without face coverings was minimal. Athletes gasping for breath at the National Stadium in Tokyo were handed masks and hand sanitizer seconds after finishing grueling races.
When athletes tested positive, they were immediately placed in quarantine, and close contacts were isolated. Instagram was littered with emotional withdrawals from competition. Many athletes talked about the all-consuming anxiety around testing positive.
The response to Covid in Paris has been different, to put it mildly. There are no requirements for testing participants or for reporting Covid-19 cases. Anne Descamps, a spokeswoman for the Paris organizing committee, said that organizers were keeping track of Covid-19 levels across the country, but not among athletes. Precautions? So 2022.
Few, if any, competing nations have a defined policy on the matter. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee established an infection program before these Olympics with the tagline: “Don’t let a cold keep you from the gold.” It has encouraged those who feel sick to go to a sports medical clinic for testing. Anyone can train and compete “as long as they feel up for it.”
Britain has been even more laissez-faire; it has simply asked its athletes to adhere to common sense. Dr. Carolyn Broderick, the medical director of the Australian Olympic team, said her team was “treating respiratory disease all the same now.” Though the country brought two machines to Paris that are capable of detecting Covid, the equipment can also be used to detect a variety of viruses. “This is part of moving on from Covid exceptionalism,” Dr. Broderick said.
Jamie Perkins of Australia wore a mask before competing in the 4x200-meter freestyle relay. Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
If athletes test positive in France, they are placed in separate accommodations and instructed to wear an N-95 mask while indoors, but it does not necessarily mean their Games are over. Many people have had Covid multiple times by now, Dr. Broderick said, and they are mostly vaccinated, so cases have been fairly mild. Other pathogens have had more significant symptoms.
“We base whether or not they train not on the diagnosis, but on the clinical condition,” she said.
But as much as Covid is no longer on the radar of most athletes — many, when asked about their approach to the virus, seemed surprised even to hear the word mentioned — and as much as nobody has been especially eager to talk about it, the virus that derailed the last two Olympics has been a factor in Paris.
The World Health Organization reported this week that at least 40 athletes had tested positive for Covid-19 or another respiratory illness, a figure based on a scan of reports from the news media and other verified sources, rather than comprehensive testing. Covid has been particularly prevalent in swimming, which took place in an indoor aquatic center where athletes were in close contact.
Some athletes — like the American gold medalist Katie Ledecky — wore masks in the ready room to minimize their risk of contracting the virus. Lani Pallister, a member of the Australian team, withdrew from one race after testing positive but, two days later, competed in the 4x200-meter relay after testing negative. Her teammate Zac Stubblety-Cook said in a social media post after he won silver in the 200-meter breaststroke that he had been “dealing with Covid” as well.
Katie Ledecky wore masks in the ready room at the Olympics to minimize the risk of contracting Covid-19. James Hill for The New York Times
The British swimmer Adam Peaty — a two-time Olympic champion in the 100-meter breaststroke — woke up on the morning of his 100-meter breaststroke final last week with a sore throat. He won a silver medal that night, beaten by the Italian Nicolò Martinenghi by two hundredths of a second. He tested positive for Covid the next day.
Given how fine the margins can be, then, it is no wonder that the Dutch feel it is worth learning at least some of the lessons of the two Olympics everyone else is trying to forget.
In addition to limiting greetings to fist bumps, the country’s athletes have been encouraged to minimize contact with friends, competitors and members of the public during the Games to reduce the risk of exposure. The thinking is only partly a health measure. It is also a sporting one.
“If it is a minor, 1 percent chance of making sure we don’t get ill so we can win a medal, we will take it,” Jorrit Croon, a Dutch field hockey player, said. “It is the same with hydration, sleep, food. Everything counts. The details matter.”
It seems to be working, in field hockey at least: The Netherlands has reached the final in both the men’s and the women’s tournaments.
“A handshake, a fist bump — it does not matter to me, particularly,” Croon said. “It is only a few weeks. I will hug everybody after the final.”
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