Official: Games to be delayed Not just the right choice – it’s the only choice

The International Olympic Committee has been forced to acknowledge reality.

The Tokyo Games won’t go on as scheduled, longtime IOC member Dick Pound told USA TODAY Sports on Monday. Only the details are left to be worked out.

This was a move everyone could see coming. Everyone but the IOC and Tokyo organizers, that is. For weeks, they fought hard to maintain the charade that everything would be fine. That this summer’s games could go ahead as scheduled despite much of the world being at a standstill.

But many athletes, national Olympic committees and sports federations, living in the real world and seeing what conditions around them were like, knew better.

The situation remains grim across much of the globe, with the number of reported COVID-19 cases and death totals continuing to rise, and there’s no way to be sure of when things will improve. Holding a games under those conditions was increasingly unrealistic, and keeping up the pretense that things could magically improve over the next few months had reached the point of being reckless.

Athletes throughout Europe and North America have been unable to train. Those who still can worried they were putting themselves or those in their communities at risk by doing so. The uncertainty and lack of transparency was a source of increasing stress and anxiety for athletes whose lives and routines are built around a fixed point on a four-year calendar.

So they effectively made the call for the IOC.

Not satisfied with President Thomas Bach’s announcement earlier in the day that postponement was an option, Canada said Sunday night that it would not send a team to Tokyo if the games are held this summer. Shortly after, Australia indicated much the same, saying its team was now focusing on a games in 2021.

On Monday, Germany demanded the IOC postpone Tokyo until 2021. Late Monday, the United States added its voice to the growing chorus.

That’s four of the largest Olympic committees in the world. If they said they weren’t going to Tokyo, and cited health risks as the reason, it left the IOC with little choice.

No choice, really.

This was not a decision the IOC – or anyone, for that matter – wanted to make, which is why Bach and Tokyo organizers dragged their feet for so long. In the 124 years of the modern Olympics, only three other times has a Summer Games not been held as scheduled, all because of world wars.

But we are in a different kind of war now as the COVID-19 pandemic rages worldwide. Entire countries are locked down, and health care systems in firstworld nations have collapsed or are on the brink of doing so. With no treatment yet and a vaccine at least a year away, everyone’s efforts and energies need to be on limiting the spread of the virus.

Simply put, this is no time for distractions, particularly one the size of an Olympics.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has staked his legacy on Tokyo, said he wanted the games to be a beacon for a beleaguered world, “proof that the human race will conquer the new coronavirus.” There will come a day when we need that, when the world coming together in one space to celebrate the triumph of human strength and spirit will be exactly the balm our weary psyches and battered economies need.

But that time is not now or, given the horrors that continue in Italy and U.S. cities, even four months from now.

Athletes train their whole lives for an Olympics. Under normal circumstances, of course they want to compete. But these are as far from normal circumstances as, God willing, we’ll see in our lifetimes. Athletes don’t want to go to a games simply to go, out of shape and at risk for injury. They don’t want to go to a games if it puts others in danger. They don’t want to go to a games if it disrupts efforts to stop the spread of the virus.

The IOC had faced existential threats to the games before – Zika, H1N1, even terrorist attacks – and all had come to nothing. But COVID-19 isn’t just a threat the games, it’s a threat to the world’s population.

Holding the Tokyo Games as planned this summer had become untenable. Even the IOC had to acknowledge that.