IOC vice-president DeFrantz says she has no official word yet on 2020 postponement

Anita DeFrantz at a press conference during the 2010 Winter Olympics. (teamUSA.org)

International Olympic Committee vice president Anita DeFrantz of the United States said Monday she had not yet received any official word that a final decision on any postponement of the 2020 Olympics has been made.

“If that is the case, then you know more than a vice-president of the International Olympic Committee,” DeFrantz said via telephone from her home in Santa Monica, Calif. “It would be news to me.”

DeFrantz, a 1976 Olympic bronze medalist in rowing, is part of the IOC executive board, which met by conference call Sunday before issuing statements acknowledging that postponement because of the coronavirus pandemic was under discussion but that starting as scheduled on July 24 also had not been ruled out. The IOC said only that cancellation was not on the agenda and a decision would be made within four weeks.

Dick Pound of Canada, the longest-serving IOC member, said via telephone Monday that he is “convinced there is no other viable option” than postponement.

“I don’t speak officially for the IOC, but I have been around long enough to understand IOC speak,” Pound said, referring to what the organization said Sunday.

“If you’re going to stick with Plan A (starting as scheduled), you don’t need nearly a month to evaluate it. So I think the decision has effectively been made.”

DeFrantz, one of the athletes who could not go to the 1980 Olympics because of the United States boycott over the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, said the possibility of starting as planned on July 24 was not immediately excluded out of sensitivity to those athletes for whom this summer could be either the last or best chance to compete at an Olympics.

IOC President Thomas Bach of Germany alluded to 1980 from a different standpoint in his Sunday letter to athletes. Bach, a 1976 gold medalist in team foil fencing, said he realized how difficult the remaining uncertainty over the 2020 Olympics was for athletes because he had been among those left hanging for the nearly two months before his country, then West Germany, made its eventual decision to join the boycott U.S. President Jimmy Carter ordered Mar. 21, 1980.

The German Olympic Committee said Monday that it wanted a decision made in sooner than four weeks and that it felt postponing the Olympics by one year was a “realistic option.”

Australia’s Olympic Committee said the same thing Sunday night (U.S. time), while the Canadian Olympic Committee went a step further, saying it would not send a team to an Olympics and Paralympics in 2020. National federations of swimming and track and field in several countries, including the United States, France, Germany and Spain, all called for postponement.

Monday evening, after 68 percent of 1,780 respondents to a survey of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls on several questions related to the 2020 Olympics showed 68 percent thought it would not be possible for the Games to be fair if they went on as scheduled, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic leadership issued a painfully mealy-mouthed call for postponement.

“To that end, it’s more clear than ever that the path toward postponement is the most promising, and we encourage the IOC to take all needed steps to ensure the Games can be conducted under safe and fair conditions for all competitors,” USOPC chief executive Sarah Hirshland and board chair Susanne Lyons said in the statement.

In the defining moment of their tenure as the top USOPC officials, Hirshland since August 2018 and Lyons since January 2019, both failed to show any courage of conviction compared with their counterparts in several other countries.

There is no doubt that the IOC has butchered its public messaging on the situation throughout, even in Sunday’s statements, creating a justified impression it is both untrustworthy and disconnected from reality.

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 defied credulity, sounding irresponsible at best and an outright lie at worst. Saying last Tuesday that talking about alternatives was “counter-productive” while exhorting athletes to “continue to prepare. . .as best they can” was both tone-deaf and insensitive.

Those indefensible statements spurred reaction from athletes and officials that undoubtedly have had some impact on the IOC. But it also is likely that the IOC privately welcomed those reactions as leverage to get the Japanese government to agree to a postponement. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for whom the Tokyo Olympics have become part of his political platform, used the word “postponement” for the first time in a Monday speech to Japan’s parliament.

The IOC’s 2020 host city contract does not mention the word postponement. It allows the IOC to terminate the contract under several circumstances, including if the IOC has “reasonable grounds to believe, in its sole discretion, that the safety of participants in the Games would be seriously jeopardized or threatened for any reason whatsoever.” Only a Japanese refusal to negotiate different possibilities could lead the IOC to think of even pointing out that nuclear option.

Postponement has tremendous financial and logistical complexities for Japan. As a country whose citizens grow up with the idea of subsuming themselves in a team effort, it seems likely the government can get buy-in or minimal resistance on all the adjustments needed.

The three postponement options appear to be: this autumn; the 2020 dates - or similar ones - in 2021 ; and the summer of 2022. Sources have told me the initial Japanese preference was for this autumn, using approximately the same dates as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (Oct. 11-24), but that is certain to bring several more months of debate over whether the pandemic will be under control by then.

Beyond that, autumn dates would cause conflicts with football, both the U.S. and world versions, that would not be very palatable for the TV networks that pay millions (or in NBC’s case, more than a billion) for rights to the Olympics.

Michael Payne, who ran IOC marketing from 1983 through 2004 and still brokers deals involving the IOC, told me Sunday that 2021 is the likeliest choice. “I don’t think there is an option,” he said.

That will involve considerable shuffling of the international sports calendar, especially the scheduled world championships in the pre-eminent Olympic sports, track and field and swimming. The French sports daily, L’Equipe, reported Monday that the international track federation, World Athletics, has already started to discuss moving to 2022 the 2021 worlds in Eugene, Ore.

While postponing the 2020 Olympics to 2022 could bring more assurance that the coronavirus pandemic is over, it would create other issues. One is that many athletes focused on 2022 would find it impossible to extend careers that long. Another is keeping the Tokyo 2020 organizing staff together that long might also be impossible, so hundreds (thousands?) of replacements would have to be trained from scratch.

At this point, two things are clear: First, the IOC would be foolhardy and unreasonable to let the decision drag on for a month. Second, even the thought of going on with the Games this summer is an obscene affront to decency and common sense.