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March 30, 2020

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Home » Sports » Olympics

Summer dates for 2021 Games likely

Source: AP | 00:00 UTC+8 March 30, 2020 | Print Edition

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 August 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 between 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 novel coronavirus epidemic. 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 US$2-3 billion with the several levels of Japanese governments likely to foot most of the bills.

Tokyo organizers say they are spending US$12.6 billion to stage the Games. However, a government audit report said it will cost at least twice that much. All but US$5.6 billion is public money.

The Switzerland-based IOC has contributed US$1.3 billion to organize the Tokyo Olympics, according local organizing committee documents. It has a reserve fund of about US$2 billion for such emergencies and also has insurance coverage.

Meanwhile, the date of the next world track championships is in limbo until the IOC decides on a new schedule for the Tokyo Games.

Sebastian Coe, the Olympic great who is now president of World Athletics, said on Friday that there are plenty of options for rescheduling next year’s world championships in Eugene, Oregon, but at the moment they all depend on the IOC.

“The International Olympic Committee, from our discussions yesterday, and the one-on-one discussions that will have already started this morning, are conscious that they need to make that decision quickly. We need athletes with some certainty,” Coe said in an online video conference call.

“And of course, the rest of the jigsaw doesn’t make a great deal of sense until you’ve got the one big centerpiece in there, and then we can start building constructively around the edges of it.”

For many sports, including track and swimming, the Olympic postponement plays havoc on their own events. The track worlds were supposed to take place next year from August 6-15 — dates that are likely to fall within the rescheduled Olympics.

But Coe said pushing the normally biennial worlds in Eugene to 2022 and creating a long stretch of having a global track championships every summer is possible, and maybe even a good thing.

“You may have a cluster. You may have world championships in consecutive years where we wouldn’t normally have had that. But for athletes, it’s not such a bad thing,” Coe said. “To go from 2021 Olympic Games into two editions of the world championships, ‘22 — possibly ’22 — ‘23 we’re in Budapest, and then into the Olympic Games in Paris in ‘24.

“It would offer athletics center stage at a very public point of the year. So let’s look at it from a slightly optimistic way of being able to punch our sport into the homes of many more people over a four-year consecutive cycle.”

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