Summer dates for 2021 Games likely
Tokyo Olympic organizers seem to be leaning away from starting the rescheduled games in the spring of 2021. More and more the signs point toward the summer of 2021.
Organizing committee President Yoshiro Mori suggested there would be no major change from 2020.
“The games are meant to be in summer, so we should be thinking of a time between June and September,” Japanese news agency Kyodo reported Mori saying on Saturday.
International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach, after the postponement was announced in Switzerland on Tuesday,
left open the possibility of spring dates.
The postponed games were to have opened on July 24 and closed on Aug. 9. Mori suggested some decisions could be made as early as this week when the organizing committee’s executive board meets.
Any final decision will be made by local organizers and the IOC, and hundreds of sponsors, sports federations and broadcasters.
Athletes have been left in limbo by the postponement. Many have been forced to stop training because of the spreading coronavirus. Even those who can train have no idea about how to schedule training to reach peak fitness at the right time.
Mori and organizing committee CEO Toshiro Muto have both said the added cost of rescheduling will be “enormous.” Early estimates put those costs at between $2 billion-$3 billion with the several levels of Japanese governments likely to foot most of the bills.
Tokyo organizers say they are spending $12.6 billion to stage the games. However, a government audit report said it will cost at least twice that much. All but $5.6 billion is public money.
The Switzerland-based IOC has contributed $1.3 billion to organize the Tokyo Olympics, according to local organizing committee documents. It has a reserve fund of about $2 billion for such emergencies and also has insurance coverage.
Meanwhile, Visa has told its
global roster of Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls their sponsorships will be extended into 2021 after the Tokyo Games were postponed, providing some financial certainty amid the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
It marks the first time the Games have been postponed for cancelled since 1944.
The credit card giant’s Team Visa scheme features 96 athletes across 27 sports, including soccer star Megan Rapinoe, gymnast Simone Biles — a quadruple gold medalist at the Rio de Janeiro Games — and twotime defending 800-meter Olympic champion David
Rudisha.
The athletes were contacted on Friday to be given the option of extending their sponsorship terms with Visa. It is the first clear commitment by a major sponsor to extend such sponsorship support after the unprecedented delay to the Olympics by a year was announced last week by the IOC.
“We elected to stand behind our roster of Team Visa athletes and make sure they knew affirmatively we were planning to do so and that we were going to offer to extend our relationship with them into 2021,” Chris Curtin, Visa’s chief brand and innovation marketing officer, told The Associated Press. “They’re all dealing with how do they maintain their training schedules, discipline and focus at
the same time they’re dealing with what’s happening with their families and their loved ones.
One thing that we wanted to do as Visa was to take one potential point of ambiguity and maybe concern off their plates, because there should be none.”
While a spring date for the rescheduled Olympics had been suggested, the signs are now pointing to the IOC using the same slot in 2021 as planned this year when the Summer Games should have started on July 24 in Tokyo.
“I’m crossing fingers for all sorts of reasons, well beyond just the games coming back, that it reflects a reinvigorated marketplace and a reinvigorated sense of humanity and a renewed kind of enthusiasm about life,” Curtin said.
“We have always been very bullish that this is going to be a special and and really important Olympics. But because of COVID-19 I think that’s now ramped up 10 times.”
Visa had already filmed some promotional campaigns with athletes for the Tokyo Games that will require some reworking. More immediately, they have spent this weekend filming their own messages promoting hand washing and social distancing that will be published over the next week.
“These are unprecedented times for all of us,” said Adam Peaty, the British swimmer who won 100-meter breaststroke gold four years ago in Rio, “but having Visa’s support makes these times of adversity quite a bit easier.”