Talk about stress: three COVID positives on the inbound plane. Her team...none

Kennedy, making her second tour as Chef de Mission for the Zambian team, is — to say the least — an experienced administrator. A former NOC Secretary General. For years an Executive Board member of FIH, the International Hockey Federation.

Nothing much fazes her. But here was COVID, with its many uncertainties. “Our problem with the athletes was, obviously, prior to the Games, the stress of making sure that they were well,” she said, adding a moment later, “You have a couple scares, someone has a cold and you wonder if they are going to recover and then there are the requirements of the Japanese being what they are and, oh, no — what’s going to happen? Just a very stressful time.”

Finally, it was time to fly to Japan. Uh-oh. Three passengers on the plane taking Kennedy and her delegation to Tokyo turned up COVID-positive. 

None, it ultimately would turn out, were on the Zambian team. “Quite scary,” she said.

All part of the many facets of being a Chef de Mission — for which there are handbooks and guidelines and then so much, especially in Tokyo, that simply had to be handled on the go.

Kennedy’s first chef tour: Athens, 2004. She was, as she admits now, new: “I learnt, No. 1, that I had a lot to learn.” Mainly: “I assumed I was going there as a typical administrator and put the ducks in order and it wasn’t quite like that. I learnt I had to get to know the people I was managing and I needed to understand them better than just managing them.”

Certain lessons stick. One: a mix-up involving boxers’ training time. She assumed the coach knew what he was supposed to do. “I didn’t take into consideration I was green,” she says now, “and so was he.”

Another: though things in Athens seemed to be running ever-so-smoothly, a government ministry official said at one moment, “I’ve just noticed one thing with the Chef de Mission. She’s not meeting regularly with the athletes. She’s so busy getting things done!”

Kennedy, now in her 60s, laughed. “You feel like you want the earth to open up.” She paused. “I grew, you know. That guy helped me grow.”

The Zambian team made it to the village in Tokyo, and, as these things go, the three COVID positives on the inbound plane could now be put to constructive use. When Hazel Kennedy said to her athletes, “Wear a mask,” they suddenly were inclined to listen.

“Maybe,” she said, “it reinforced in them that we do have to wear a mask, that we do have to be careful. Being young sometimes, you think someone is making life difficult.”

As Kennedy had predicted, once in the village it was, more or less, smooth sailing: “In fairness to the team, we didn’t have any major problems.”

With Tokyo now history, she said, she can look back with a deep sense of satisfaction: “The mere fact that the Japanese hosted the Olympic Games was quite awesome for me. We got to a point after the postponement that the Games could not take place in my mind. 

“To see that they actually worked so hard that they did take place — that was magical.”