Why the Paris Olympics are going to feel so cathartic. FINALLY we can draw a line under Covid in sport, writes OLIVER HOLT

Breakfast at the media hotel in Ginza during the Tokyo Olympics of 2021 was a particularly interesting experience. We used the elevator marked for foreigners to get down to the lobby in the morning. The other elevator was reserved for Japanese guests.

When the elevator doors opened, the entrance to the breakfast room was only a few yards away across the lobby but foreigners were not allowed to use that entrance. We had to embark on a journey of our own.

We went out of a door at the back of the lobby and picked our way through a garage, out into an alleyway at the rear of the hotel. Then we walked around a corner into the street, round another corner and then entered a side door that took us into the breakfast room.

Japanese guests ate their food in the breakfast room. Foreign guests took their breakfasts back to their bedrooms. I'm not complaining about it. It's the way it was. These were the Pandemic Games. Things were different. Everyone was worried. Tokyo was in a State of Emergency. Those were the rules.

For the first three days after arrival, foreign journalists covering the Games were confined to their hotels for all but 15 minutes of every 24 hours. A lobby official recorded when you left and when you returned for your quarter of an hour on the streets.

And when the three days were up, we were only allowed to use official Olympic media shuttles, which picked us up at a stop a couple of hundred yards away, to take us to the Main Press Centre and to venues. For the next fortnight, public transport, or anything that might bring us into contact with local people, was still out of bounds.

Occasionally, much to the chagrin of the hotel staff, I ate pizza on the hotel fire escape for a break from the confines of the room. The British Olympic Association organised a group Zoom interview with Laura Muir that felt like a precious window on the outside world.

We took spit tests every day and dumped the tubes with our identification numbers on them in a giant bin in the MPC for them to be tested for Covid. And then we ventured back on to the buses to fan out to watch the events at a Games like no other, a Games without spectators.

It was a fascinating Olympics to cover as a reporter because of the unusual, often eerie atmosphere at venues that were deserted apart from competitors and journalists. There are things I'll remember all my life, such as going to the Budokan to watch judo and seeing one of my heroes, Jonny Brownlee, win gold at last in the mixed triathlon against a backdrop of Tokyo Bay and the Rainbow Bridge.

But most of all, it felt desperately sad. It felt sad because so much of the joy of the Olympics is about the athletes' interaction with the crowd. The Games are a chance for competitors, many of whom train in near anonymity, to savour their moments of adulation and respect.

And yet Tokyo was shorn of all that. They had rebuilt a beautiful Olympic Stadium with a stunning design and every day, we walked into it and its concourses were deserted and its stands were empty and it felt as if it were all wrong.

My best memories of Olympic Games are of the crowds: the amazing atmosphere at the Aquatics Centre in Sydney in 2000, the fans in the 1896 Olympic Stadium at the end of the marathon in Athens in 2004, the wonder on the faces of the spectators watching the Opening Ceremony in Beijing in 2008.

At London 2012, it was the combination of the volunteers and the public that made the Games, that made it feel as if the Olympics were showcasing the best of us, that made it feel as if we were a generous people, mad for sport, welcoming and open and progressive. Looking back, London 2012 feels like a high point for the country in this century. It brought us together when so much else seems to have divided us.

And at Rio 2016, even if there was scepticism about the Games and how much it was costing and whether the new metro Line 4 would have the transformative effect people hoped for, there was joy in sitting in the sold-out giant stands on Copacabana, watching the beach volleyball and being at the Maracana to see the men's football team take gold.

So much of the magic of sport is wrapped up in the supporters and in Toyko, one image is burned in my thoughts. It is of schoolchildren standing on a raised train station platform, peering through plexiglass, trying to get a view of the skateboarding at the Ariake Urban Sports Park below. That was as good as the spectating experience got for the public in 2021.

That's why the Paris Olympics are going to feel so cathartic when they begin with Friday's Opening Ceremony that will start with a great spectacle on the River Seine and will be watched live by hundreds of thousands of people in the French capital.

Because of its four-year cycle, it is the last of the great global sporting events to get back to normal after Covid. Our last Olympics was still wonderful because of its athletes and the feats they performed but it was scarred and compromised. Paris will draw a line under the pandemic for sport.

This time, it will be a proper celebration of the greatest athletes in the world, a chance for them to compete in front of cheering, adoring, excited, tumultuous fans in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Openness brings danger, too, of course. It brings concerns about terrorism and disruption and lone wolf attacks. It will mean an intense level of policing, not dissimilar to the high visibility of the security forces in France during Euro 2016, which was sometimes jarring but deemed necessary in the aftermath of the Bataclan atrocities.

The freedom to acclaim the best of humanity's sporting endeavours has a price but as we prepare to glory in archery at Les Invalides, athletics at the Stade de France, beach volleyball in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, marathon events that race past the Tuileries Gardens and the Pantheon and tennis at the clay cathedral of Roland Garros, it feels as if life is about to be breathed back into the Olympics.

Tokyo 2020 was a triumph for the resilience of the human spirit. Paris 2024 will be a return to joy.

Who should replace Southgate 

Sometimes, when big football clubs are badly run, the confusion in their leadership is most visible in the inconsistency of their managerial appointments. 

At its most simple, a club might appoint a manager who favours direct football and then, when that goes wrong, replace him with a manager who wants to implement a tiki-taka style and then, when that goes wrong, revert to a manager who prefers direct football. 

The FA should learn from that kind of dysfunction and avoid it. They have alighted upon a fine template with the management of Gareth Southgate. Now that he has departed, they do not need a revolution. 

They need to take one final step forward with an accomplished coach and a good man-manager. It is time for a calm, rational decision, not a headlong rush into the arms of a celebrity, big-name manager. Those are just a couple of reasons why my choice to replace Southgate as boss would be Graham Potter or Lee Carsley.

Ten Hag will be GONE by Christmas 

Manchester United's decision to stick with Erik ten Hag as manager for the start of the coming season reflects well on the loyalty of their supporters. 

It is also a sign of reduced expectations at the club that a coach who led them to an eighth-place finish in the Premier League last season can survive at the helm. 

United appear to have made a couple of decent early signings in Leny Yoro and Joshua Zirkzee but I still think a club with strong leadership would have recognised that Ten Hag is not the man to take them forward and would have drawn a line under his tenure last season. 

Feel free to dig this up when Ten Hag turns into the next Sir Alex Ferguson but I think he'll be gone by Christmas.