IOC Inches Ever Closer to Postponing the 2020 Tokyo Games

(Bloomberg) -- Facing enormous pressure to call off the 2020 Tokyo Games, the International Olympic Committee made its most public step yet toward postponing the world’s biggest sporting event.

Following an executive board meeting on Sunday, the IOC said it would enhance its planning around potential changes to the games, including postponing the event, which was scheduled to begin July 24. But it said a cancellation of the games would not be considered.

The meeting came amid a growing chorus of people saying that the coronavirus pandemic was putting athletes in a compromising position, and making qualifying events impossible to hold.

“The IOC is confident that it will have finalized these discussions within the next four weeks,” the group said in a statement.

Citing people familiar with the talks, the Financial Times reported Sunday that a “gentleman’s agreement” had been reached not to cancel the games. It said the likely new date was the summer of 2021, though other options also were under discussion.

Sunday’s announcement follows weeks of stubborn insistence by Japanese and international officials that the games would go forward as planned. As recently as March 19, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the goal was to hold the 2020 Olympics as planned, without any reduction in scale. On a conference call the following day, Team USA’s leadership said the same.

That position became increasingly untenable in recent days, as the number of global coronavirus infections grew; as of Sunday, there were more than 318,000 cases worldwide, with more than 13,000 deaths. Athletes, IOC members and national team leaders made vocal calls to cancel or postpone.

The games are also losing popular support in Japan. According to a poll in the Japanese newspaper Asahi, only 23% of respondents said the Olympics should be held as scheduled.

The IOC said it plans to work with the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee and Japanese authorities, plus sports and national federations around the world. It said it would also seek commitments from its media partners and top-tier sponsors, who pay billions to associate themselves with the Olympics.

In its statement, the IOC laid out some of the logistical hurdles associated with delaying the games. They include millions of hotel nights that were booked this year and the possibility that some of the venues might not be available in 2021 or 2022.

Tokyo has been preparing for the Games for a decade, spending more than $26 billion to ready the city, according to some estimates. With about 600,000 foreign visitors and more than 11,000 athletes expected to attend, the Olympics were supposed to reinvigorate the economy, which saw a 6.3% contraction in the last three months of last year.

If the games don’t happen, the Japanese economy could face some $60 billion in losses tied directly to the games and indirectly from the lingering effect on tourism, domestic consumption, exports and capital investment, according to a March estimate from Goldman Sachs.

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