The Tokyo Olympics will open next year in the same time slot scheduled for this year’s games.

Tokyo organizers said Monday the opening ceremony would take place on July 23, 2021 – almost exactly one year after the games were due to start this year.

“The schedule for the games is key to preparing for the games,” Tokyo organizing committee president Yoshiro Mori said. “This will only accelerate our progress.”

Last week, the IOC and Japanese organizers postponed the Olympics until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.

This year’s games were scheduled to open on July 24 and close on Aug. 9. But the near exact one-year delay will see the rescheduled closing ceremony on Aug. 8.

There had been talk of switching the Olympics to spring, a move that would coincide with the blooming of Japan’s famous cherry blossoms. But it would also clash with European soccer and North American sports leagues.

After holding out for weeks, local organizers and the IOC last week postponed the Tokyo Games under pressure from athletes, national Olympic bodies and sports federations. It’s the first postponement in Olympic history, though there were several cancellations during wartime.

The Paralympics were rescheduled to Aug. 24-Sept. 5.

Rescheduling to cost in the billions

Both Mori and CEO Toshiro Muto have said the cost of rescheduling would be “massive” – local reports estimate billions of dollars – with most of the expenses borne by Japanese taxpayers.

Muto promised transparency in calculating the costs, and testing times deciding how they are divided up.

“Since it (the Olympics) were scheduled for this summer, all the venues had given up hosting any other events during this time, so how do we approach that?” Muto asked. “In addition, there will need to be guarantees when we book the new dates, and there is a possibility this will incur rent payments. So there will be costs incurred and we will need to consider them one by one. I think that will be the tougher process.”

Katsuhiro Miyamoto, an emeritus professor of sports economics at Kansai University, put the costs as high as $4 billion. That would cover the price of maintaining stadiums, refitting them, paying rentals, penalties and other expenses.

Japan is officially spending $12.6 billion to organize the Olympics. However, an audit bureau of the Japanese government says the costs are twice that much. All of the spending is public money except $5.6 billion from a privately funded operating budget.

The Switzerland-based International Olympic Committee is contributing $1.3 billion, according to organizing committee documents. The IOC’s contribution goes into the operating budget.

IOC President Thomas Bach has repeatedly called the Tokyo Olympics the best prepared in history. However, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso also termed them “cursed.”

Aso competed in shooting in the 1976 Olympics, and was born in 1940. The Olympics planned for 1940 in Tokyo were canceled because of World War II.

The run-up to these Olympics also saw IOC member Tsunekazu Takeda, who also headed the Japanese Olympic Committee, forced to resign last year amid a bribery scandal.

Source: AP

Tennis great, Roger Federer, has joined the list of sports icons helping out the needy during the coronavirus pandemic, with the Swiss Maestro donating more than a Million Dollars to vulnerable families in his homeland.

The 20-time Grand Slam Champion and his wife, donated one Million Swiss Francs, equal to one million and 22 thousand dollars, saying that ‘nobody should be left behind, as Switzerland battles against the Pandemic’.

The country is reported to have the 9th highest number of infections in the world, with nearly 10 thousand confirmed cases and 122 deaths. Federer is currently recovering from a knee surgery he underwent last month, and was targeting a return in June, in time for Wimbledon.

The tennis season is, however, suspended until at least the 7th of June, due to the global spread of the coronavirus.

Source: Presstv

The Olympic Games has suffered political boycotts (Moscow 1980) and terrorism (Munich 1972), but has only ever been cancelled due to outbreaks of war.

With the announcement that the 2020 Games will be postponed over the coronavirus pandemic, here is a look back at Berlin 1916, Tokyo 1940 and London 1944 — when global conflicts forced the Games to be scrapped.

– Berlin 1916 –

At the IOC meeting in Stockholm in July 4, 1912, the sixth Olympic Games were awarded to Berlin, with the German capital beating out competition from Alexandria, Amsterdam, Brussels, Budapest and the US city of Cleveland.

Germany pulled out all the stops, opening a stadium with a capacity of around 33,000 in western Berlin’s leafy Grunewald district in 1913 to celebrate 25 years of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign as head of the German Reich.

The stadium took only 200 days to build, according to the German Olympic Committee (DOSB) and featured a 100-metre-long swimming pool on its northern side.

The sporting programme was to feature athletics, wrestling, fencing, shooting, modern pentathlon, cycling, gymnastics, swimming, rowing, hockey and golf.

For the first time, women were invited to participate in swimming, diving, tennis and netball, the DOSB said in its history of the 1916 Games.

A two-day test event was held on June 27 and 28, 1914 in the Berlin stadium. On the second day, Archduke Frank Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo, starting a chain of events that would led to the outbreak of World War I.

It is not clear when the Games fell victim to the war but the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, decreed that the Berlin 1916 Games still be counted as the sixth Olympiad, even though they never took place.

The next Games — the seventh Olympiad — were awarded to Antwerp in recognition of the horrors suffered by Belgium in World War I.

A flag with the famous Olympic rings symbol was raised for the first time and doves were released at the opening ceremony as a sign of peace. Germany was excluded.

– Tokyo 1940 –

In the same way Tokyo 2020 officials have framed the Games as the “Recovery Olympics” after the devastating 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown, Tokyo cast a bid for 1940 as a chance to show it had recovered from a catastrophic earthquake in 1923.

Spearheaded by legendary Japanese figure Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo and the country’s first IOC member, Tokyo was awarded the 1940 Games after ferocious lobbying, including persuading Italian dictator Benito Mussolini to pull out of the race.

The Games were supposed to celebrate the 2,600 years since the enthronement of Japan’s mythical first emperor Jimmu, but they became untenable because of the country’s military aggression in China.

With Japan at war with China from 1937, diplomatic pressure grew for Japan to give up the Games and the military began to question why resources should be diverted from the war effort to fund Olympic construction.

The Japanese Olympic Committee eventually bowed to the inevitable and in 1938 told the IOC it would not be hosting the Games, euphemistically citing the “trouble with China” as the reason.

They also abandoned the winter Games, planned in the northern city of Sapporo.

The IOC awarded the summer Games to Helsinki instead and the winter Games to St. Moritz in Switzerland, but these too fell victim to World War II.

Tokyo eventually became the first Asian city to host the Olympics in 1964.

– London 1944 –

Despite what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called the “gathering storm” over Europe due to Nazi Germany, the IOC met in London in July 1939 to decide which city would host the 1944 Olympics.

They plumped for London, which beat bids by Rome, Detroit, Lausanne and Athens.

But only three months later, Britain had declared war on Germany and the 1944 Games was a non-starter.

The winter Games were due to be held in Cortina d’Ampezzo in Italy but these were also scrapped. The city hosted the 1956 Winter Olympics and is due to co-host the 2026 Winter Games with Milan.

Just three years after the war ended, and with the world began gradually getting back onto its feet, London hosted what became known as the “Austerity Games” in 1948. Neither Germany nor Japan were invited to participate.

Source:  AFP

The Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) and Paralympic Committee (CPC) said on Sunday that Team Canada will not participate in the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the summer of 2020 due to concerns about the outbreak of the coronavirus.

Opposition to holding the Games in July has risen sharply in the past 48 hours, with several major stakeholders such as U.S. Track and Field and UK Athletics, along with several national Olympic committees, calling for a delay because of the pandemic.

More than 13,000 people have died globally since the coronavirus outbreak began.

“The COC and CPC urgently call on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) to postpone the Games for one year and we offer them our full support in helping navigate all the complexities that rescheduling the Games will bring,” the committees said in a statement.

“While we recognise the inherent complexities around a postponement, nothing is more important than the health and safety of our athletes and the world community,” it added.

The organising committee for the Olympics and Paralympics will be holding a news conference in Tokyo later on Monday.

On Sunday the IOC said it would hold discussions that would include an option of putting back the July 24 start date or even moving the Games by a year or more due to the global coronavirus outbreak, but said cancelling the Games would not solve problems or help anybody.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe responded to the IOC’s statement by telling parliament on Monday that postponing the Olympics may become an option if holding the Games in its “complete form” became impossible.

“If that becomes difficult, we may have no option but to consider postponing the Games, given the Olympic principle of putting the health of athletes first,” he said.

Abe also said calling off the Games entirely was not an option, echoing the IOC position in its statement that cancellation “was not on the agenda”.

While Canada is the first country to say it will not send a delegation to compete in the summer of 2020, the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) said on Monday its athletes should prepare for a Tokyo Games taking place in 2021.

“The AOC believes our athletes now need to prioritise their own health and of those around them, and to be able to return to the families, in discussion with their National Federations,” the AOC said in a statement.

Alternate scenarios

Canada’s Olympic Committee said it reviewed the IOC’s assessment of the situation and applauded it for recognising the need to consider alternate scenarios for hosting the Games.

“We are thankful to the IOC for its assurance that it will not be cancelling the Tokyo 2020 Games and appreciative that it understands the importance of accelerating its decision-making regarding a possible postponement,” it said.

“We also applaud the IOC for acknowledging that safeguarding the health and wellness of nations and containing the virus must be our paramount concern.

“We are in the midst of a global health crisis that is far more significant than sport.”

Canada’s boycott will add to growing pressure on the IOC to alter the schedule after criticism from a slew of current and former athletes with health concerns.

The US Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), which has been supportive of the IOC’s wait-and-see position, expressed a different tone to the latest update, saying in a statement it welcomed some clarity but did little to address growing uncertainty and athlete anxiety.

“The progress reflected in today’s IOC update to the global athlete community is an important step in providing clarity, but our athlete community continues to face enormous ambiguity surrounding the 2020 Games in Tokyo,” said USOPC chief executive Sarah Hirshland and USOPC athletes advisory council chair Han Xiao in a joint statement.

The Olympics have never been postponed or cancelled during peacetime but the IOC’s decision to even consider postponement was met with relief from several major stakeholders, including World Athletics, the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) and major national Olympic committees.

(REUTERS)