IOC says 2020 Olympics decision within four weeks; former marketing chief says 2021 only alternative; Aussies, Canada say no to 2020 while U.S. walks IOC line
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International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach (IOC / Christophe Moratal)
Under growing pressure from the world sports community to put off the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, the International Olympic Committee finally used the word “postponement” in conceding Sunday that its steadfast “The Games Will Still Go On” position in the face of the coronavirus pandemic was untenable.
The IOC’s announcement, in the form of a statement and a letter to athletes from its president, Thomas Bach, did not rule out the possibility of the Games opening in a scaled-down form as scheduled this July 24 and made only two definitive statements:
*Cancellation of the 2020 Olympics is “not on our agenda.”
*The IOC expects to be able within four weeks to have a decision on when the 2020 Olympics will take place.
Sunday night, the Canadian Olympic Committee chose doing the right thing over following the party line by announcing it would not send teams to an Olympics and Paralympics in the summer of 2020 and urging a postponement.
“This is not solely about athlete health – it is about public health,’’ read a Canadian Olympic Committee statement.
A few minutes later, the Australian Olympic Committee issued a statement saying it was telling its athletes “to prepare for a Tokyo Olympics Games in the northern summer of 2021.”
“It’s clear the Games can’t be held in July,” Ian Chesterman, head of Australia’s Olympic delegation for Tokyo, said in the statement.
An hour prior to the Sunday announcement, a well-connected Olympic marketing executive had told me in a telephone conversation that he saw a postponement to 2021 as the decision.
“I don’t think there will be an alternative,” said Michael Payne, who ran marketing operations for the IOC from 1983 through 2004, and since than has been involved in brokering IOC deals with broadcast networks and global sponsors.
Payne ruled out postponing the Olympics only until this autumn because it would lead only to further uncertainty over whether the pandemic had been brought under control by then.
“The last thing you want to do is for this debate to drag on,” Payne said. “If you say `One year from now’ – actually 16 months from now – the whole focus can turn to world health, and the athletes will know exactly where they stand.”
The IOC’s action Sunday did not eliminate the uncertainty for athletes, whose calls for postponement had grown louder, more frequent and more widespread by the end of last week, with many athletes noting the overwhelming disruption to their training and lives. Last Tuesday, the IOC said, with stunning callousness, that it “encourages all athletes to continue to prepare. . .as best they can.”
But the IOC’s position shift did accomplish two of the things I had suggested in a column last Monday: it told athletes the truth and gave them a time frame for a decision.
“Different athletes have different opinions on that, but it is something,” Han Xiao, chair of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee Athletes Council, told me in a message Sunday. “Having a somewhat definite timeline gives athletes something to look towards and know when they can expect to hear something.
“I didn’t expect anything drastically shorter than that because postponement or a reduced Games are all complex and there are a number of consequences to each that have to be worked through.”
The USOPC, which has been marching in lockstep with the IOC’s positions, remained in line with a Sunday statement reading, “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. . .we know the difficult obstacles ahead and we are all appreciative that the IOC has heard our concerns and needs, and is working to address them as quickly as possible. Every day counts.”
British Olympic Association chairman Hugh Robertson urged the IOC to have “rapid decision-making for the sake of athletes who still face significant uncertainty.”
In his letter to athletes, Bach acknowledged the anxiety athletes are feeling over not knowing if and when the Olympics would take place and said that some would find the IOC’s latest action “unsatisfactory.”
In an apparent suggestion the Olympics still could take place on time this summer, Bach insisted a decision on a new date for the Olympics was impossible today because the world health situation remained fluid, with improvement in some countries and deterioration in others.
Acknowledging what he should have said much earlier, when he was insisting the status was quo, Bach wrote, “. . .nobody can really make fully reliable statements about the duration of this fight against the virus.”
Payne, a longtime insider who wrote a book on Olympic branding, unsurprisingly defended Bach’s earlier intransigence on speaking about the possibility of alternate scenarios for Tokyo 2020. He said Bach faced constraints about contradicting what the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Tokyo Olympic organizers were saying.
Yet Bach’s having said that the words “postponement” and “cancellation” had not even been mentioned during a March 4 meeting of the IOC executive board still defied credulity, sounding irresponsible at best and an outright lie at worst.
“March 4 looks like a lifetime ago at the pace everything is now moving,” Payne insisted, blending logic with realpolitik.
The IOC presumably has been sounding out Japanese leaders over the past several weeks about matters related to rescheduling but not hearing any sense of concession until the past few days.
Prime Minister Abe told Japan’s parliament Monday that if it was impossible to hold the Games this summer in a “complete” form, “we have to decide to postpone it, giving top priority (to the health of the) athletes,” according to Kyodo News.
It now seems likely that the Japanese have agreed to a postponement until 2021, but it could take up to four weeks to iron out most of the enormous logistical ramifications of such a change before announcing the new dates.
Issues including the future availability of sports venues, current and future bookings for accommodations and conflicts between a rescheduled Olympics and the existing international sports calendar have to be addressed.
Olympic champion Sebastian Coe, now head of track and field’s global governing body, World Athletics, reportedly wrote Bach in no uncertain terms the Games should be postponed from this summer:
“The unanimous view across all our areas [international regions] is that an Olympic Games in July this year is neither feasible nor desirable and have asked that I write to you to request that the Games be moved,” Coe’s letter said.
In a worst-case scenario, the coronavirus may still be enough of a real and present danger in the summer of 2021 to force an eventual cancellation of the 2020 Olympics. Deciding to move these Summer Games to 2022 would make it harder to preserve Japan’s current organizational plans and make it harder for many athletes to stretch careers or the peaks of careers that were focused on July 2020.
One thing is certain: there is no rational argument for having the Olympics take place in Tokyo this summer. Bach only has to re-read his own words about “reliable statements” to realize that.
Even the IOC, its outsized sense of self-importance notwithstanding, should realize it cannot play god. Emphasis on should.
