It really is like an unfolding train wreck.

What is it about their plight that has the Japanese organisers failing to see the glaringly obvious?

The polls of their own people that have anywhere between 70 to 80 percent of them not wanting the games held in their own country.

The fact the host city is not just under a Covid emergency but an emergency that has been extended.

The fact the IOC president cancelled his visit because getting in and around is neigh on impossible.

The fact the torch relay has been pulled, a torch relay that was already a shadow and sham of what it has been or should be.

The fact that an increasingly large number of athletes are openly questioning whether it’s worth the effort or risk in turning up, with Naomi Osaka and Rafael  Nadal  leading this week’s selection of those wondering out loud

The fact the IPl, an already established and not to mention a much smaller event, was well underway, complete with well implemented bubbles, couldn’t be finished.

The fact the so called test days the Japanese have hosted involved a couple of hundred people in empty stadia, not the thousands upon thousands they will actually need to host.

There is not seemingly a single example of upbeat assessment that has this thing looking like any sort of success.

And yet still they carry on in complete denial.

Now I personally don’t mind whether it goes ahead or not. I have no vested interest, and maybe that’s my advantage. 

I am not an athlete that’s trained for years and this is my moment and I will not be denied. And I am not an IOC member that has billions at stake. And I am not Japanese with one cancellation under my belt and therefore desperation to bull doze ahead.

Maybe that’s the real reason this thing is such an obvious bit of carnage.  When you’re invested to the extent they are, you can’t see the wood for the trees.

And I get their desperation. Cancel this and you may as well wait until 2024: you can’t hold an Olympics two years in a row. Or can you? Maybe that mad trick is yet to be played.

But if you view this from any sort of dispassionate distance, you cannot fail to see that holding an event of the Olympics size in a country with the Covid mess the way it is literal insanity.

It shocking timing, given large swathes of the world are seeing some real light and real freedoms.

But run before you can walk. Go to the pub before you hold the rock concert. Show a bit of common sense.

If someone doesn’t stand up and pull the pin, the regret, embarrassment fall out and anger that will flow will be Covid’s most obvious and avoidable disaster yet.