RIGHT CALL BY THE IOC NOW BRINGS OPPORTUNITY TO RESET THE GAMES
It’s been known for years that the Olympics have become far too big for their own good
The International Olympic Committee did the inevitable on Tuesday, postponing the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics that were supposed to begin in late July until sometime beyond this year “but not later than summer 2021.”
Team Canada can take a measure of credit for providing the first boot in the pants of the IOC that brought about the delay, with their announcement on Sunday that they were out of a 2020 Olympics. The change that they wrought has given a measure of certainty to athletes, sent an important message about putting public health before personal and financial interests, and has likely saved some lives. “It wasn’t safe,” to continue, said COC president Tricia Smith, simply, on Tuesday. All of that deserves praise. This was the right move, even if it took the IOC an appallingly long time to come to it. The swells at the Swiss offices seemed like literally the last people on the planet to accept that barging ahead with preparations for a global sports gathering was a bad idea amid a global pandemic. Read the room, fellas.
But while it was the right call, there’s no telling what it will mean for these Olympics and beyond. It has been known for years that the Olympics became far too big for their own good.
Will the coronavirus, and this delay, begin to knock them back to a more reasonable size?
At this point it is hoped that the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics will be a close facsimile of whatever they were going to be before COVID -19 knocked the world for a loop. The IOC’S statement on Tuesday said it hoped the “Olympic flame could become the light at the end of the tunnel in which the world finds itself at present.” The flame, already in Japan for a torch relay that began awkwardly this month, will remain in that country. The Games themselves will still be called Tokyo 2020, even if they take place next year. That has the benefit of nice symbolism, a reminder of what the world (hopefully) overcomes to get to the point of a functioning Games. It also allows organizers to not waste a whole bunch of T-shirts, plush toys and signage. The facilities are, obviously, all in place and will be a year from now. This will not be without its challenges. Ten of the 43 venues were intended to be temporary; they will have to be maintained, while mostly unused, for an extra 12 months. The athletes village, a cluster of new residential apartments that were to be converted into condominiums and sold after the Olympics, will now also be in limbo. Other facilities like the media centre and certain venues that had non-sports functions — some events were to be held in a converted convention centre — will have to push back the bookings they were already taking for the months after the Games.
While these things are all manageable, especially in light of the sacrifices made in all sectors because of the pandemic, the larger question for Japan is the vast sums of money already spent on the Tokyo Olympics. It was originally pitched as a Us$7-billion event, and officially that number has already passed $12 billion. Audits, though, have suggested the true cost is beyond $26 billion, and that the official tally is artificially low because it excludes big-ticket infrastructure costs. This helps explain why the decision to postpone took so long: Japan is desperate to recoup some of that investment through the economic boon of the Games themselves.
The question is whether future Olympic hosts will want to expose themselves to this kind of risk. The next two summer cities, Paris and Los Angeles, are theoretically working with budgets closer to Tokyo’s original plan, and the IOC has pivoted to promoting the concept of “sustainable” Olympics that reuse existing facilities. But whether that comes to pass is uncertain. Organizers blow past their cost estimates for every Olympics, something that is bound to happen as the IOC adds events to an ever-expanding footprint. Keeping one infrastructure project on budget is tricky, doing it with 43 is a nightmare.
For Tokyo, the more pressing concern will be whether the anticipated economic spinoffs even come to pass. The number of visitors in 2021 — athletes, staff, tourists — will almost have to be smaller than it would have been in 2020, as everyone adjusts to new economic realities. Broadcasters and sponsors, the IOC’S lifeblood, will be looking at their Olympic investments and wondering what to do about an exposure that has been put off into next year.
Consider Team Canada, which was out in front of all this, but has its own future to consider. Will its blue-chip sponsors, which include a national airline and a shopping-mall conglomerate, be willing to re-up the same level of support? Will the government? COC chief executive David Shoemaker said on Tuesday that they received an “outpouring of support” from their marketing partners after their Sunday night announcement, but these decisions will be played out country by country, each dealing with their own coronavirus fallout. How many of them will send smaller Olympic delegations as priorities are reconsidered? How many will have to approach their Tokyo plans with an eye to Beijing 2022, now potentially happening just six months later?
A global celebration in Tokyo in 2021 is a worthwhile goal. And a big, flashy Olympics, same as it ever was, is a nice part of that idea. Whether it is realistic is another matter.