The Olympic Torch Got To Japan, Now What?

The 2020 Olympic torch relay started a short while ago in the same place it always does: Greece, where men once devised elaborate competitions as an excuse to wrestle naked and now use it as an excuse to run ads that want us to believe the best athletes in the world eat Double Quarter Pounders before a big race.

The torch had finally made it to Japan, for its home stretch, with the Olympics just around the corner in July. The Japanese leg of the relay wasn't slated to begin until March 26, where it would have made its way from Fukushima all the way to Tokyo on July 24 (two cities that radiate with an inviting neon glow for different reasons). That was the plan. Instead the torch made it to Japanese shores just in time ... for the International Olympic Committee to decide to postpone the games until 2021.

The news was broken by International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound in an effort to pull focus away from the disheartening news and toward the fact that his actual name is Dick Pound. A name which sounds like an event that could make it into the Pairs Olympics in 2024 assuming the IOC can settle on exactly what shade of purple the dick must turn before a winner is crowned. Paired up with skeet shooting, it could also be part of the new summer biathlon.

With the fate of the Olympics sealed, the question now becomes, what will happen to the flame. Do they have enough fuel to keep it lit for a year? Will they put it out but tell everyone it's still going? Are they going to keep handing the torch to people in an indefinite holding pattern in a relay race that stretches into the infinite, until every person on earth has had their turn moving the torch 400 meters? Will humanity as a whole get stuck passing the literal torch to the next generation, to our grandchild, and to their grandchildren, and so on -- until we've forgotten why we're passing it, but will kill to protect the tradition that we've come to believe is the only thing keeping the Frankenstines at bay? Probably that last one, if we're being honest.