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On March 24th, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe proposed a one-year postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, following talks with IOC president, Thomas Bach.
Thus, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will take place in 2021.
Abe said they had established that cancelling the Games was out of the question, and that Bach had agreed “100%” that a postponement was the most appropriate response to the global disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
“We agreed that a postponement would be the best way to ensure that the athletes are in peak condition when they compete and to guarantee the safety of the spectators,” Abe told reporters, following the conversation.
On the previous day, Abe said that postponement was unavoidable if the 2020 Games couldn’t be held in a complete manner amid the coronavirus outbreak.
Until just a few days ago the IOC, along with the Tokyo organising committee and the Japanese government, had insisted there were no plans to delay the Olympics given they were not due to open for another four months.
The decision was sealed when both Canada and Australia announced that they would not send their athletes to Japan if the games took place.
“I know this is heartbreaking for so many people, athletes, coaches, staff and fans but this was absolutely the right call and everyone should follow their lead,” the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said.
“Our most important conclusion from this broad athlete response is that even if the current significant health concerns could be alleviated by late summer, the enormous disruptions to the training environment, doping controls and qualification process can’t be overcome in a satisfactory manner,” the US Olympic and Paralympic committee said in a statement.
Lawrence Waterman, who headed Health and Safety for the 2012 Olympics in London, urged the IOC to postpone the Games for the first time in their 124-year modern history. The reasoning was that they couldn’t be held safely.
“These Games need to be postponed, and the sooner the IOC and the Japanese government face up to this the better. It’s simply not safe to put the games on during a global pandemic,” Waterman said in a statement.
“People’s safety and health should come before the costs of delaying contracts. The London Games were the first in history to be completed without a single fatality, we set the standard on health and safety at the Olympics.”
The opposition to July summer Olympic Games grew when the national Olympic committees of Brazil, Germany, and Norway all issued statements calling for the Games to be postponed.
At the same time, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump both issued statements confirming they were closely monitoring the situation in Tokyo.
The postponement is very costly for the host country, which has spent more than $12 billion on the event, while huge sums are also at stake for sponsors and broadcasters.
Goldman Sachs estimated this month that Japan would lose $4.5 billion in inbound and domestic consumption in 2020 if the Olympics did not take place as planned.
The hysteria surrounding COVID-19, mostly propagated by the media, is so all-encompassing that even the Olympics were postponed. No event has been postponed in the past.
Since the first modern Olympic Games were held in 1896, only three have been abandoned. On each of those occasions it was due to war.
- In the run-up to the 1916 Summer Olympics, the German Empire beat bids from Alexandria, Amsterdam, Brussels, Budapest and Cleveland to host the Games and in 1913 constructed a new “Deutsches Stadion” that could officially seat 30,000 people. The Berlin Games were canceled due to the outbreak of World War I in July 1914. Organizers initially thought that the war would be “over by Christmas” but an armistice was not reached until November 1918.
- Tokyo and Sapporo, Japan had been originally set to host the 1940 Olympic Games, summer and winter respectively, after winning the bid in 1936 — making them the first non-Western cities selected to host. After the war began between Japan and China in July 1937, the Japanese government decided to forfeit their right to host the Games, claiming that the war required “the spiritual and material mobilization of Japan.” New hosts were picked: Helsinki, Finland, for the summer Games and the German town of was chosen Garmisch-Partenkirchen for winter. In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, World War II began and they were cancelled in their entirety.
- The 1944 games were supposed to take place in London in the summer, and Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy in the winter. They were cancelled because of World War II continuing.
Therefore, the COVID-19 outbreak spreading across Europe is being threaten like a world war. While theoretically this approach could be seen as reasonable, there are indications that some forces are just exploiting the crisis for their own intersts. Western states seized an opportunity to explain the erupted global economic crisis with COVID-19-related issues. In fact, the global economic just has no opportunities for a further growth. So, it started declining. Global elites are now trying to use the COVID-19 outbreak to shape the global scene and global economy like it already happened during the First and Second World Wars.
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no big deal. it’s a political event in any case. atheletes used to promote a political agenda. what’s the radiation count in Tokyo these days?
Games are REALLY old, of course. Interesting that the games were discontinued for a long time, and then revived at the behest of the Oracle of Delphi who claimed that the people had strayed from the gods, which had caused a plague and constant war (sound familiar?). Restoration of the games was designed to end the plague and usher in a time of peace. Good luck nowadays.
Wonder if the IOC will still accuse the Russians of doping?