Coronavirus already creating chaos, wreaking havoc for Olympics
The speculation about this summer’s Tokyo Olympic Games is coming fast and furious now. Across just a few hours on Tuesday, Japan’s Olympics minister said the coronavirus outbreak could lead to the postponement of the Games this summer, while the International Olympic Committee answered by saying it remains committed to staging the Games as scheduled July 24 to August 9.
Tokyo has pumped in more than $12 billion to organize the event, while billions more were spent on related projects.
“We are preparing for a successful Olympic Games, Tokyo 2020,” IOC head Thomas Bach said at an executive board meeting to discuss the summer sporting extravaganza.
Earlier on Tuesday, Japan’s Olympics minister Seiko Hashimoto had said that details within Tokyo’s contract with the IOC “could be interpreted as allowing a postponement” until the end of the year.
That host city contract states that one of several triggers which would allow the IOC to withdraw the Games from Tokyo would be if “the Games are not celebrated during the year 2020”.
Hashimoto said, however, that Japan’s government and Tokyo were still committed to the Games as scheduled.
Who knows what Thursday will bring.
This kind of confusion should come as absolutely no surprise. The story of the coronavirus is both ominous and fast-changing. It was just last week that veteran IOC member Dick Pound said that if it proved too dangerous to hold the Tokyo Olympics, organizers were more likely to cancel the Games than postpone or move them. He added that if such a decision were to be made, it would have to come by late May.
What was shocking last week seems like normal conversation this week. The chaos is utterly predictable. How could it not be? No one has any idea what is going to happen with a virus that has spread rapidly from country to country, leaving thousands dead in its wake, so of course the answers of Olympic officials from around the world are swinging from one extreme to the other.
Until a final decision about the fate of the Tokyo Games is made, expect more of this. IOC spokesperson Mark Adams actually said this Tuesday afternoon: “No, we’ve made a decision. And the decision is that the Games go ahead. That was made some time ago. We see no reason to change that decision. There we are.”
Except everyone knows that’s not the final word. No one has a clue, and there’s nothing new about that in the Olympic world. A decision certainly doesn’t need to be made today, or even in the next few weeks.
Any change to dates would instantly wreak havoc on most sports programmes, with competition calendars planned several years ago to accommodate the Tokyo timings.
Finding a new date in 2020 at this stage, which would firstly need the green light from the IOC, would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the 33 sports federations present in Tokyo.
Bach, a 66-year-old lawyer and former Olympic fencing champion, has an iron grip on IOC decision-making and is known for sticking to his guns in adversity.
“I would like to encourage all the athletes to continue their preparation for the Olympic Games, Tokyo 2020 with great confidence and full steam,” the German told reporters in Lausanne. “From our side, we will continue to support the athletes and the National Olympic Committees.”
Multiple sports events around the world have been cancelled during the epidemic, which has killed more than 3,000 people in China and spread to more than 60 nations including Japan where infections are near 1,000 and 12 people have died.
There will be all kinds of sporting events held between now and Pound’s drop-dead date of late May, both domestic and international, including the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments, the world figure skating championships in Montreal and the Masters golf tournament.
The IOC, Tokyo organizers and various Olympic stakeholders, including the American television rights-holder NBC, can certainly take their lead from what happens with those events.
As we take a snapshot of the landscape at the moment, the options for the Tokyo Olympics seem to be these:
• The Olympics go on as scheduled July 24 to August 9.
• The Olympics are cancelled for just the fourth time in the summer since the rebirth of the modern Games in 1896. The reason the other three times? World Wars I and II.
• The Olympics are postponed for a few months but still held in 2020, as Japan’s Olympics minister suggested. The disruptions would be massive to the athletes and the TV rights-holders, among others, but if that’s the only answer that would save the Olympics, perhaps it becomes palatable.
• There’s a fourth option: Hold the Olympics when they are scheduled, but without spectators. It’s an awful thought right now. No one wants that. But how would that idea look in another month or so if the coronavirus outbreak does not abate?
For most of the world, the Olympics are a TV show. This option would allow the show to go on, just as the Tokyo Marathon did last weekend, through mostly empty city streets.
At the moment, the concept of a spectator-less Olympics is unfathomable – until it’s not.
(USA Today/TNS)