Back
Olympic and Paralympic Games Postponed Until 2021
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games have been postponed until next year because of the global coronavirus pandemic.
The Games were due to take place on July 24, but will now go ahead “no later than summer 2021”.
“I proposed to postpone for a year and [IOC] president Thomas Bach responded with 100% agreement,” said Shinzo Abe, Japan’s Prime Minister.
The event will still be called Tokyo 2020 despite taking place in 2021.
In a joint statement, the organisers of Tokyo 2020 and the IOC said: “The unprecedented and unpredictable spread of the outbreak has seen the situation in the rest of the world deteriorating.
“On Monday, the director general of the World Health Organization, 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 [Tuesday], 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.”
The IOC had given itself a deadline of four weeks to decide on whether to postpone the Games, but pressure had been mounting on them to make a quicker decision.
Canada had become the first major country to pull out of both events on Sunday, while USA Track and Field, athletics’ US governing body, had called for postponement.
/Stewart Sports news editor
