Debating when sports might return to play
As fields, arenas and stadiums sit vacant and silent, the desire for sports to return far exceeds the capacity among those who oversee them to determine when they will. Assessing probability is futile, but public health leaders indicate that fans and leagues should prepare for sports to remain absent not just for the coming months but into next year.
The novel coronavirus outbreak has already canceled or postponed the NCAA Tournament, the Olympics and Wimbledon. It has jeopardized the NBA playoffs, the Stanley Cup playoffs, the Masters and the baseball and soccer seasons. It is possible the rest of the 2020 sports calendar, including college football and the NFL, also will be lost, according to interviews with and public comments from more than a dozen sports leaders and public health experts. Most stressed the uncertainty in such a fluid situation.
“From my point of view based on data — and I’m huge sports fan, so this is really hard — I can’t really predict or truly speculate,” said Jared Evans, a senior researcher at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “We need as a population to be prepared for anything. And also be prepared for that disappointment.”
Major sports bodies at the professional and collegiate levels have planned for a range of contingencies that include playing in empty stadiums and canceling seasons altogether, and they are bracing for the impact of the worst of them. They are driven by both business and altruistic motivations, eager to salvage financial losses and to provide diversion to the public.
But disease experts suggest the possibility feared most in the sports world — no major events for the rest of the year — may be more real than many believe.
“My crystal ball is not just cloudy,” said Ali Khan, dean of the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Public Health and former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office of Public
Health Preparedness and Response. “It’s black.”
When Dr. Anthony Fauci, part of the White House’s coronavirus task force, was asked last week about people looking forward to baseball games and concerts this summer, he did not answer directly. He said the only way to stop the virus is a vaccine, which experts expect will not be ready before early 2021.
“Unfortunately, I think perhaps if anything, having large spectator sports open back up may even have to be delayed a little bit longer than relaxing some of the other things,” said Dean Winslow, an infectious disease doctor at Stanford. “I hate to say that, because I’m a big sports fan.
“There’s also the scenario a lot of people worry about, including my friend Dr. Fauci, that if you relax the control measures too soon, you could potentially induce a second wave of transmission to susceptible people,” Winslow added when asked about professional and college football starting on time. “It’s a little too soon to make that prediction. I certainly don’t think it’s impossible that we’ll be able to start resuming things such as sporting events by the early fall.”
The yearning among fans for sports’ reappearance collides with reality. The U.S. Tennis Association said last week that it still plans to stage the U.S. Open as scheduled from late August through mid-September in New York. The site of the tournament, the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, is being converted to a temporary hospital.
The leaders of the NFL, after its medical director addressed team owners Tuesday, expressed confidence its season would begin as scheduled, without conditions. Days earlier, ESPN college football analyst Kirk Herbstreit said in a radio interview that he would be “shocked” if any NFL or college football was played this fall.
Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott told the Mercury News last week that the conference has reviewed multiple models for how the college football season could unfold. In the most optimistic, training camp will be standard and the season will start on time.
“The most pessimistic,” Scott said, “has no season at all.”
How will we know it is safe for sports again? It is a thorny question, as other parts of the world have discovered.
In China, as coronavirus cases started to drop and everyday life appeared to stabilize, the Chinese Basketball Association targeted an April 15 return. Government restrictions pushed the date back to early May. Last week, as cases started to rise again, the league announced an indefinite pause.
Nippon Professional Baseball, Japan’s top league, could serve as a cautionary tale for Major League Baseball. With the number of new cases on the way down, Nippon officials began preparing for a delayed start to the 2020 season, pushing its scheduled opening day from March 20 to April 24. Teams began playing exhibition games in empty stadiums.
However, on March 26, three Hanshin Tigers, including star pitcher Shintaro Fujinami, tested positive for the coronavirus, according to the Associated Press. The team canceled its exhibition games, ordering players and staff to self-quarantine for 14 days, and disinfected its stadium.
Nippon still planned to open the regular season April 24, but as Japan’s coronavirus outbreak worsened, that became untenable. On Friday, league officials announced an indefinite extension to its delayed start.
U.S. experts said opening stadiums in this country would be among the last stages of lifting pandemic-related restrictions. The first step would be letting people go back to work, with social distancing still in place. Travel restrictions would thaw. Only after those changes could authorities consider allowing stadiums to open.
The best-case scenario, Winslow said, is that social distancing and other restrictive measures combined with higher summer temperatures lead to a dramatic decrease in cases by late May.
“That would potentially give public-health people the incentive to at least consider starting to relax these restrictions,” Winslow said. “That would mean allowing potentially sporting events and concerts and that sort of thing to happen by the early fall.”