Tokyo Olympic Organizing Committee Reportedly Orders Up Postponement Scenarios For The 2020 Games

It was with evident relief that two sources close to the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee have broken ranks to reveal to Reuters five hours ago that they have been seconded to draft plans for the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games. “Finally, we’ve been asked to make a simulation in case of a postponement,” the anonymous official was quoted. “We’re making alternative plans — B, C, D — and looking at different postponement timeframes.”

For its part, the Olympic flame arrived on March 20 — with its enormous carbon footprint, by jet, from Greece — in Tokyo, where, shielded by its little brass lantern, it was received on the tarmac by Yoshiro Mori, the organizing committee president. Once installed in public, it was met with a distinctly non-social-distanced 500-yard-long queue of Olympic devotees anxious to photograph it. Today it arrived in the Iwate prefecture, pictured below, where a similar crowd awaited it.

Even just one report of the deliberation of a postponement “scenario,” or multiples thereof, is very good news. But in the face of the organizing committee’s and the Japanese government’s fierce iron-willed denials of postponement and/or cancellation, it seems as though the trial balloons, though welcome, won’t be quite enough balm on the inflamed calls for action coming from increasing numbers of athletes and national Olympic committees, as well as stakeholder sports organizations such as US Track and Field.

The circumstances for postponement and/or cancellation — namely, the merciless onmarch of SARS-CoV-2 through country after country — are only growing more dire. That the virus is interrupting training regimes — such as via the increasing, state-by-state lockdowns in the U.S. — is undeniable. That it will interrupt if not wholly interdict the ability of many countries to field teams to Japan by July is clear. What athletes and Olympic stakeholders alike have been calling for is action, or at least a clear message, and not, as the International Olympic Committee has been bruiting about, “waiting until May” to make the call.

That any sort of blip in the Games’ highly wrought schedule will be painful to Japan, to the world, to the organizing committee and to the Games’ sponsors is not under debate. The price tag for hosting any Olympic Games is hefty — a reported $12 billion spent by Japan on infrastructure, with $3 billion in sponsorship riding on that — and the rewards for hosting in both short and long term are fetching. One is loathe to part with such a promising engine of cash, primed and ready to fire.

But Tokyo and its organizers can, also, earn back praise and esteem by making their postponement as creatively welcoming as the Games could be if presented whole.

The trick to that will be to shift the presentation paradigm wholly from what the IOC and the organizers have exhibited to us thus far, with the Games standing over July and August as a kind of Stonehenge, anchored and immovable, able to withstand any onslaught short of World War. Instead, the planning paradigm for a postponement should be: An Olympic Games as fleet, agile, and very flexible, so as to encourage the best of its athletes and member countries, all of whom we want to be safe.