Tue | Nov 19, 2024

Summer date suggested for Tokyo

Published:Monday | March 30, 2020 | 12:22 AM
A barge carrying the Olympic rings in the Odaiba section of Tokyo, Japan, host of the next Summer Olympic Games, on Wednesday.
(AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
A barge carrying the Olympic rings in the Odaiba section of Tokyo, Japan, host of the next Summer Olympic Games, on Wednesday.

TOKYO, Japan (AP):

Tokyo Olympics organisers seem to be leaning away from starting the rescheduled Games in the spring of 2021. More and more, the signs point towards the summer of 2021.

Organising committee president Yoshiro Mori suggested that 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 (IOC) 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 that some decisions could be made as early as this week when the organising committee’s executive board meets.

Any final decision will be made by local organisers 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 coronavirus. Even those who can train have no idea about how to schedule training to reach peak fitness at the right time.

Mori and organising committee chief executive officer Toshiro Muto have both said that the added cost of rescheduling will be “enormous”. Early estimates put those costs at between US$2 billion (about J$267 billion) and US$3 billion (over J$400 billion), with the several levels of Japanese government likely to foot most of the bills.

Tokyo organisers say they are spending US$12.6 billion (around J$1.6 trillion) to stage the games. However, a government audit report said it will cost at least twice that much. All but US$5.6 billion (roughly J$747 billion) is public money.

The Switzerland-based IOC has contributed US$1.3 billion (around J$173 billion) to organise the Tokyo Olympics, according to local organising committee documents. It has a reserve fund of about US$2 billion (close to J$267 billion) for such emergencies and also has insurance coverage.