‘Postponement has been decided’
VETERAN International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound told USA TODAY yesterday afternoon that the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games are going to be postponed, likely to 2021, with the details to be worked out in the next four weeks.
“On the basis of the information the IOC has, postponement has been decided,” Pound said in a phone interview. “The parameters going forward have not been determined, but the Games are not going to start on July 24, that much I know.”
Pound, a Canadian who has been one of the most influential members of the IOC for decades, said he believes the IOC will announce its next steps soon.
“It will come in stages,” he said. “We will postpone this and begin to deal with all the ramifications of moving this, which are immense.”
When told what Pound had said and asked for an IOC response, spokesperson Mark Adams said, via text: “Well, as we announced yesterday, we are looking at scenarios.”
Pound’s comments came less than 24 hours after
IOC president Thomas
Bach indicated, for the first time, that postponing the Tokyo Games would be a possibility. In a letter to the athlete community, he said the IOC would begin exploring alternate ways to stage the Games, including postponement, and plan to reach a decision within the next four weeks.
By yesterday morning, the German Olympic Committee had joined its counterparts in Brazil and Norway, among other countries, in publicly urging the IOC to postpone the Olympics.
This would be the first time the Olympics have been suspended, though they have been cancelled previously during the World Wars.
Boycotts also caused serious complications for the Games in 1976, 1980 and 1984. But in each case, the event itself went on as scheduled.
Pound’s comments came after the chair of the British Olympic Association, Hugh Robertson, had warned that Great Britain are unlikely to be able to send a team to Tokyo should the Olympic
Games go ahead as scheduled. Robertson welcomed the International Olympic Committee’s announcement that it is now spending the next four weeks looking at contingency scenarios following the outbreak.
However, he warned that due to the widespread closure of training facilities and the likelihood that the impact of coronavirus in Britain will worsen over the coming weeks, there is almost certainly no way Team GB could compete if the Games were given the green light for this summer.
“I think it is very simple. If the virus continues as predicted by the Government, I don’t think there is any way we can send a team,” he told Sky Sports News. “And I base that on two things. Firstly, I don’t see any way that the athletes and Team GB could be ready by then.
“Elite training facilities are perfectly understandably and quite correctly closed around the country, so there is no way they could undertake the preparation they need to get ready for a Games.
“Second, there is the appropriateness of holding an Olympic Games at a time like this,” he added. “We are actually in a process where we are talking to all our sports. We will complete that over the next couple of days.
“At the end of that we have already said to the IOC that we think their four-week pause is absolutely the right thing to do.”