The International Olympic Committee, faced with mounting pressure to postpone the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, said on Sunday that it would decide within four weeks whether to delay or scale down the Games.
Yet not long after it announced its timeline, support for having the Games this summer continued to crumble as Canada said it would not send its athletes, Australia told its athletes to prepare for a rescheduling of the event to 2021 and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan acknowledged the Olympics might not go on as planned.
“I couldn’t think of cancellation,” Abe told members of Parliament. But, he added, if it were not possible to hold the Games as scheduled, “I think we may not have a choice but to make a decision to postpone, putting a priority on athletes.”
The I.O.C. statement on Sunday reiterated the position of Thomas Bach, president of the organization, that canceling the Games altogether was not an option and sought to address complaints that the committee had not been transparent in how or when a decision would be made.
“Cancellation is not on the agenda,’’ the statement, which was released about 3 a.m. Tokyo time, said.
Instead, Bach outlined a delicate balancing act of preserving the Games while facing the reality of the spreading virus.
“On the one hand, there are significant improvements in Japan where the people are warmly welcoming the Olympic flame,” Bach’s statement said. “This could strengthen the I.O.C.’s confidence in the Japanese hosts that the I.O.C. could, with certain safety restrictions, organize Olympic Games in the country whilst respecting its principle of safeguarding the health of everyone involved.
“On the other hand, there is a dramatic increase in cases and new outbreaks of Covid-19 in different countries on different continents. This led the executive board to the conclusion that the I.O.C. needs to take the next step in its scenario-planning.
“A number of critical venues needed for the Games could potentially not be available anymore. The situations with millions of nights already booked in hotels is extremely difficult to handle, and the international sports calendar for at least 33 Olympic sports would have to be adapted.”
Bach added that the I.O.C. was confident it could make a decision “within the next four weeks.” Later Sunday, he wrote to the athletes, calling on their support and telling them that cancellation would have meant destroying their dreams.
A short while before the emergency call, Bach received a letter from Sebastian Coe, the head of track and field, a marquee sport of the Summer Games. In it, Coe, who won four Olympic medals as a middle-distance runner, wrote that it was the unanimous view of the sport’s regional leaders that hosting the Games in July as planned “is neither feasible nor desirable.”
“No one wants to see the Olympic Games postponed, but as I have said publicly, we cannot host the event at all costs, certainly not at the cost of athlete safety, and a decision on the Olympic Games may become very obvious very quickly,” Coe wrote. “I believe that time has come and we owe to our athletes to give them respite where we can. And in this matter, I believe we can.”
And late Sunday, the Canadian Olympic Committee and Canadian Paralympic Committee said that they would not send their athletes to Tokyo in the summer of 2020, and hoped that the Games would be postponed for one year. The committees also voiced their approval for the I.O.C.’s decision to not cancel the Games.
Australia in its statement said, “It’s clear the Games can’t be held in July. Our athletes have been magnificent in their positive attitude to training and preparing, but the stress and uncertainty has been extremely challenging for them.
A year’s postponement may hit track hard. It would most likely require it to reschedule its world championships, the first to be staged in the United States.
The announced time frame did not placate some Olympic athletes and leaders.
Hugh Robertson, chairman of the British Olympic Association, said four weeks was likely too long to wait.
“We urge rapid decision-making for the sake of athletes who still face significant uncertainty,” Robertson said. “Restrictions now in place have removed the ability of athletes to compete on a level playing field, and it simply does not seem appropriate to continue on the present course toward the Olympic Games in the current environment.”
Christian Taylor, a two-time defending gold medalist in the Olympic triple jump and the leader of the Athletics Association, a labor group that provides a greater voice to the world’s track and field athletes, also said that four weeks was too long to wait. His group has been conducting a survey of its members and has received 4,000 responses. Over all, 72 percent said the Olympics should not go on as planned, and 78 percent voted in favor of a postponement. In addition, 87 percent said their training had been compromised.
“I know there are many pieces to the puzzle,” Taylor said. “This is bigger. It’s bigger than a competition. At some point you have to bite the bullet.”
For weeks, Olympic leaders had been steadfast in resolving to persevere with the Games despite the coronavirus pandemic and the growing restrictions athletes are facing on training as lockdowns are announced in their home countries.
In recent days, however, pressure has grown for the I.O.C. to postpone the Games or, at the very least, announce a timeline for a decision.
Norway’s Olympic committee, in a statement on Friday, became the first to state a clear preference for the Games to be delayed until the global pandemic can be brought under control. The Brazilian Olympic committee on Saturday endorsed postponing the Games until 2021.
U.S.A. Swimming and U.S.A. Track & Field, the governing bodies for those sports in the United States, have called for a one-year delay. Together, those sports typically account for most of the United States’ medals.
An athletes’ rebellion has also been brewing. Several have spoken out recently, notably Hayley Wickenheiser, a member of the I.O.C.’s athletes’ commission. Wickenheiser, a doctor and five-time Olympian, described efforts to press on with plans for the Games amid a global health crisis as “insensitive and irresponsible.”
The I.O.C. leadership was shocked by the scale of the impact the virus has had on large parts of Europe, with Italy now surpassing China for the number of dead, and casualty figures in neighboring countries growing rapidly by the day.
In his most recent public comments on the decision, Bach on Thursday backed off his previous hard line that the Games would happen this July.
“Of course we are considering different scenarios,” Bach said. “But we are contrary to many other sports organizations or professional leagues in that we are four and a half months away from the Games. They are even more optimistic than we are, because most of them have postponed their events until April or the end of May. We are talking about the end of July.”
Although the Olympics may not begin for four months, sponsors, fans, athletes and national Olympic committees have to make decisions and commitments now. Sponsors, who pay $25 million a year or more to be affiliated with the Games, are finalizing hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising and promotional expenses, as well as travel and hospitality for thousands of employees and guests they plan to take to the Games.
In addition, many of those companies are experiencing deep losses in world markets, and in western Europe and the United States, business has ground to a halt.
Ricardo Fort, the head of global sponsorships for Coca-Cola, the oldest sponsor of the Olympics, with an unbroken partnership since 1928, wrote on Twitter: “The IOC is taking the right steps to proper evaluate their options. Whatever decision they make, it will be based on facts (and not on the pressure of any one Federation in any one country, no matter the Federation or the country).”
The comments from some of the national federations calling for a pause to the Games are said to have infuriated and surprised some at the I.O.C., not least because they did not raise them at a video conference meeting with Bach on Tuesday.
Brian Lewis, who heads Trinidad and Tobago’s Olympic body, was the only one to put forward the suggestion of postponing the Olympics. But, Lewis said, Bach placated him by saying the I.O.C.’s management of the situation was in line with advice from health experts, including the World Health Organization.
In recent days, athletes, including many unable to train because of measures put in place to tackle the spread of the virus, have called for the I.O.C. to decide, sooner rather than later, whether the Games will be delayed and for how long.
“So many people feel that if there was an answer then we would know what to do,” said Kathleen Baker, a gold and silver medalist in swimming at the 2016 Olympics.
The athletes have grown increasingly frustrated with Bach’s insistence that they continue to push “full steam ahead” as though the Games will happen in July when doing so might put their health and the health of others in jeopardy, in addition to defying edicts of local governments that are closing all but essential businesses and ordering citizens to stay inside as much as possible.
Motoko Rich contributed from Tokyo and Damien Cave from Sydney, Australia.
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