“What a joy to meet people who are not politicians,” exclaimed a radiant President Reuven Rivlin, as he looked out at the overflowing crowd of athletes in the main hall of the President’s Residence.
Then he remembered that there was one politician in the room – Culture and Sport Minister Chili Tropper.
Only an hour earlier, Rivlin had met with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for their first update meeting since Bennett took office, to discuss Rivlin’s upcoming trip to Washington next week.
It was important for Rivlin to meet with the Olympic and Paralympic teams before they leave for Japan next month.
As Rivlin will be handing over the reins to Isaac Herzog on July 7, there was no other time for the meeting while he was still president.
Beneath the pergola leading into the main hall were numerous enlarged photographs of individual athletes and groups of athletes engaged in different sports, mounted on tall stands. It was almost like an open-air Sports Hall of Fame.
Although the opening ceremony of the games will be held on July 23, contests will actually begin two days earlier. Team members, already attired in their official gear, minus the jackets, were not sure exactly when they will be leaving for Tokyo, and said that they will be attending a training camp in Israel before they go.
Because Tokyo is six hours ahead of Jerusalem, Sabbath observers in Israel will be able to watch the opening on television, long before candle-lighting time.
Among the dignitaries who came to the President’s Residence were Ilana Romano and Anki Spitzer, the widows of Yossef Romano and Andre Spitzer, members of the Israel Olympic team who were murdered by Black September terrorists in the Munich Massacre at the 1972 Olympics; and Japanese Ambassador Koichi Mizushima, who has been hop-scotching from one Olympics-related event to another.
Also present were Igal Carmi, chairman of the Israel Olympic Committee, and Yehoshua Dekel, national president of the National Paralympic Committee.
Carmi said that this year’s delegation will be the largest ever to represent Israel, and although it has not yet reached 90 athletes, he was optimistic this figure would be attained in coming days.
The Paralympic Games will be held two weeks after the start of the Olympics, and Dekel was confident that several of the 28 athletes in the delegation would come home with medals. Israel has always done far better in the Paralympics than in the Olympics, and Paralympic Athletes have brought home in excess of 370 medals, including several gold medals.
Dekel noted that Israeli athletes in general had done very well in international competitions over the past year, despite the challenges of the pandemic.
Although the games are taking place a year later than originally scheduled, the T-shirts worn by the athletes were imprinted with Tokyo 2020, and all references to the games are in terms of 2020 and not 2021, with the exception of the dates of events.
All the speakers praised the athletes for their dedication, their constant aspiration to do better and their ability to train and improve during the worst period of the pandemic.
“You worked so hard to get to this point,” said Rivlin, who conceded that his favorite sport is a ball game – “not tennis” he clarified.
Then, resorting to the vernacular, he said: “The ball is in your court.”
He reminded the members of the teams that they had been chosen because they are the best of the best, “the very few who have managed to get so high, to be the emissaries of our country at the greatest, oldest and most important of international sporting competitions” which began in ancient Greece.
Aware of the strain and tension experienced by every competitive athlete, Rivlin had particularly warm words for the Paralympic athletes, for whom competition is more difficult, he said, because they are also challenged by their particular disability.
Some of the members of the Olympic team are competing for the second, third and fourth times.
But there are also sports in which Israel has not competed before, such as archery. Itay Shanny, 22, will be making history as the first archer competing for Israel since it began participating in the Olympics in Helsinki in 1952, at which time the delegation included 22 male athletes and three female, who participated in a total of five different sports. There’s been a lot of progress since then, not only in terms of overall numbers, but also in gender ratios and in the variety of sports.