Tokyo Games must go ahead
– Tokyo’s postponed Olympics will go ahead next year regardless of the coronavirus pandemic, IOC vice president John Coates (above) has said, vowing they will be the “Games that conquered Covid”.
The Olympics have never been cancelled outside of the world wars and Coates, speaking in a phone interview, was adamant that the Tokyo Games will start on their revised date.
“It will take place with or without Covid. The Games will start on 23 July next year,” said Coates, who heads the International Olympic Committee’s Coordination Commission for the Tokyo Games.
“The Games were going to be the Reconstruction Games after the devastation of the tsunami,” he said, referring to a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan in 2011.
“Now these will be the Games that conquered Covid, the light at the end of the tunnel.”
In a landmark decision, the 2020 Olympics were postponed because of the global march of the pandemic and they are now set to open on 23 July, 2021.
But Japan’s borders are still largely closed to foreign visitors and a vaccine is months or even years away, feeding speculation about whether the Games are feasible at all.
Japanese officials have made clear they would not delay them a second time beyond 2021.
There are signs that public enthusiasm in Japan is waning after a recent poll found just one in four Japanese want them to go ahead next year, with most backing either another postponement or a cancellation.
Coates said the Japanese government “haven’t dropped the baton at all” following the postponement, despite the “monumental task” of putting the event back a year.
“Before Covid, (IOC president) Thomas Bach said this is the best-prepared Games we’ve ever seen, the venues were almost all finished, they are now finished, the village is amazing, all the transport arrangements, everything is fine,” he said.
“Now it’s been postponed by one year, that’s presented a monumental task in terms of re-securing all the venues... something like 43 hotels we had to get out of those contracts and re-negotiate for a year later.
Coates said the IOC was doing its part, putting in “something like an extra $800 million to support the international federations. – AFP