Cancelling Games unthinkable: official

TOKYO: Cancelling the 2020 Olympics is “unthinkable” although the classification of the coronavirus as a pandemic will likely have some impact on the Games, the Tokyo city governor said on Thursday.

“It can’t be said that the announcement of a pandemic would have no impact... But I think cancellation is unthinkable,” Yuriko Koike told reporters.

Doubts are increasingly being raised over whether the Olympics can be held as scheduled from July 24 to August 9.

Organisers have insisted the Games will go ahead as planned and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), with whom the final decision rests, has said there has not yet been any talk of cancellation or postponement.

The IOC has said it will coordinate closely with the World Health Organization, which has now officially classified the outbreak as a pandemic.

As the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the world, Tokyo Olympics organisers received a boost on Thursday with World Athletics president Sebastian Coe’s assumption that track and field would take place at the Games.

World Athletics had already been forced to postpone the world indoor championships in the Chinese city of Nanjing until March 2021. The world half-marathon champs in Poland have been pushed back to October and a number of marathons across the world have been cancelled.

“On the broader picture of what does the remaining element of the season look like, it will be a challenge for everybody,” Coe told AFP in an interview in Monaco.

“We are working on the assumption that we will be in Tokyo where our sport will be able to flourish. “We are planning to be in Tokyo. There are no contingencies.”

Coe, who was chairman of the organising committee of the 2012 London Olympics, added that World Athletics were “clearly monitoring the situation by the hour”.

“We have to monitor and have to deal with the situations in real time and that has taken up a lot of our thinking space and that of our member federations. This has posed challenges almost wherever you look in our sport.”

But Coe, a two-time Olympic 1500m gold medallist for Britain, played down the wider effect that the cancellation of track and field meets might have on potential qualifying for the Tokyo Olympics. “I’m not sanguine or particularly cavalier about the situation, but our sport is in better shape than most because we have many more opportunities for our athletes to qualify,” he told AFP.