The lead up to 2021 Olympics was unlike any other Olympics in history. The 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics was wiped out by the COVID-19 pandemic and was the first Olympics canceled since the 1940 and 1944 Games because of World War II. The International Olympic Committee went to extraordinary measures to make sure “The Games Must Go On.” The 2021 Tokyo Games will be a political statement as well. Either science beats or loses to COVID-19. Political statements and the Olympics have gone on hand in hand since 1904. The Olympics is a global platform and people have seized that moment.
On Saturday, August 21 the library hosted Evan Weiner in a virtual presentation as he discussed the politics behind the 2021 Summer Olympics.
Weiner is a speaker, author, with a radio and TV background. In 2007, the Department of State sent him to talk to foreign nationals at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas to speak about the politics of sports business in America. Evan started his journalism career at the age of 15 by hosting a Spring Valley High School talk show on WRKL Radio, Mount Ivy, N.Y. in 1971. He also, at the same time, was a “correspondent” covering high school sports for the Rockland Journal News, Nyack, N.Y. at the same time. By 1978, he was covering news for WGRC Radio and won two Associated Press Awards in 1978 and 1979. In the 1980s, he started his long association with Westwood One Radio. Evan was a contributing columnist for New York Newsday (2001-05); AM-New York, the New York Press, the Bergen (New Jersey) Record, the Philadelphia Metro, Washington Examiner, Orlando Sentinel, Rhode Island’s Sports Journal, and for The Chicago Tribune’s Spanish Hoy! newspapers in N.Y., Chicago and LA.