Time for IOC to drop Pollyanna act and tell everyone there may be no Olympics in 2020

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan (third from right, with flag) and the Tokyo bid team celebrate after being chosen host city for the 2020 Summer Olympics.

There are some 11,000 athletes hoping to compete at the Summer Olympics scheduled to open July 24 in Tokyo.

At this point, all those athletes should be able to (choose a biblical or mythological metaphor):

*See the handwriting on the wall.

*Feel the sword of Damocles above their heads.

And yet the president of the International Olympic Committee and the Prime Minister of Japan refuse to acknowledge publicly the possibility the 2020 Summer Games won’t take place in 2020 – or ever.

In their hubristic refrain that the Games will go on, these alleged leaders provide unjustifiable encouragement to athletes whose preparation and qualification processes already have been severely disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.

These athletes, who get an Olympic opportunity once every four years, deserve honesty, not self-interested, Panglossian avoidance of reality.

They deserve to know sooner than later about the fate of these Olympics.  They deserve to see now that the honchos in charge, IOC President Thomas Bach of Germany and Japanese PM Shinzo Abe, are not toying with lives and global safety for ego gratification or political ends, as the U.S. president* has done.

It doesn’t inspire much confidence that the IOC let a planned 10-day boxing qualification tournament go on three days in London before deciding to stop it Monday night.  Boxing, of all sports, with its necessary close contact. (The IOC is in charge of the event because the hopelessly corrupt international boxing federation has been suspended.).

 No rational person can assert with certainty today that the 2020 Olympics will go on as scheduled – or that they will go on at all.  At this point, most rational people would be surprised if they do go on.

One of the IOC’s bedrock (but disingenuous) claims is that everything about the Olympics is done for the sake of the athletes.

So tell them the truth, that these Olympics are imperiled.

Tell them that the IOC and the Japanese are looking at other options – or that no other option is possible.

Tell them those things no later than Tuesday, after Bach reportedly is to have a conference call with leaders of the international federations whose sports are on the Summer Olympic program.

Tell them when to expect a final decision.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Sunday that there be no gatherings of 50 or more people for eight weeks.  Eight weeks takes us to Sunday, May 10.

Common sense would say a decision about the 2020 Olympics must be made by the end of May, as the IOC’s senior member, Dick Pound of Canada, had the prescience to suggest three weeks ago, when the scale of the problem was exponentially smaller.  The IOC and Japanese Olympic leaders all but shouted Pound down.

And national federations in the United States should let athletes know they are creating alternative team selection processes, especially in swimming and track and field, should it be impossible to have the late June trials where the results entirely determine selection in those sports.  Make those alternate selection ideas public now, so there is sufficient time to discuss them.

(Of course, if the trials cannot take place, it would seem extraordinarily unlikely that an Olympics could go on less than a month later.)

As the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday, U.S. swimmers are scrambling to find places to train, since so many train at colleges that have closed their facilities.  Other facilities, both public and private, also are closing.  The same is true of gyms.  And tracks.  All over the United States and much of the globe. And several sports - judo, wrestling, boxing, taekwondo - have constant physical contact in training.

Most athletes almost certainly would choose going to the Olympics in an undertrained state over not going at all.  Is it fair to force them into such a choice?  Even for those able to continue training, the uncertainty would affect motivation.

The idea of an Olympics with no spectators isn’t worth discussing.  If having spectators is too much of a risk – both to their own health and that of those they later come in contact with – why should athletes and coaches and officials and any media be subjected to that risk?

Postponing the Olympics until 2021 does not seem feasible, since it would entail conflicts with biennial World Championships in swimming and track, which are very important financially to the federations that run those sports. There could also be a conflict with another major event, the European Soccer Championships, for which a one-year postponement from this summer is under discussion.

As my colleague Gianni Merlo of the Italian sports newspaper, Gazzetta dello Sport, suggested last week, it would make more sense to have a postponed Summer Olympics in 2022.

Yes, there is a Winter Olympics scheduled that year in Beijing, but that should not be a disqualifying factor.  Remember that the Winter and Summer Games took place in the same year through 1992.  They were split for commercial reasons: sponsors and TV networks preferred their resources not be exhausted in the same year.

Such decisions need not be made immediately, even though one can say with certainty right now that the fate of the 2020 Olympics is of little or no consequence against the backdrop of 6,500 deaths worldwide – so far.

That does not mean that those dedicating themselves to the success of the 2020 Olympics are inconsequential.  It means the athletes of the world and everyone deeply involved in the Olympics, from sports governing bodies to spectators to sponsors to media, need to know immediately that those in charge are not mindless Pollyannas and that they are discussing all eventualities.

After all, even Dr. Pangloss would no longer dare claim, even satirically, that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.