Yahoo Finance IOC announces that 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be postponed until 2021 due to coronavirus
The International Olympic Committee and the 2020 Tokyo Organizing Committee announced in a joint statement on Tuesday that the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be postponed until 2021 due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
The IOC announced on Sunday that it would take the next month to examine every possibility to stage the Olympics (besides outright cancellation), but following a conference call with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, IOC president Thomas Bach, and other high-ranking officials, the decision was made to postpone.
The unprecedented and unpredictable spread of the outbreak has seen the situation in the rest of the world deteriorating. Yesterday, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that the COVID-19 pandemic is "accelerating". There are more than 375,000 cases now recorded worldwide and in nearly every country, and their number is growing by the hour.
In the present circumstances and based on the information provided by the WHO today, the IOC President and the Prime Minister of Japan have concluded that the Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo must be rescheduled to a date beyond 2020 but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic Games and the international community.
This will be the first peacetime Olympics postponement in modern history, and the logistics of moving every Olympics and Paralympic event into the future will be nightmarishly complex. The announcement from the IOC says that the games will be held “not later than summer 2021,” and the Japan Times reported that it is possible that the games could be played next spring.
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