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Post by Admin on Mar 24, 2020 19:51:24 GMT
THE PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE (IOC), THOMAS BACH, AND THE PRIME MINISTER OF JAPAN, ABE SHINZO, HELD A CONFERENCE CALL THIS MORNING TO DISCUSS THE CONSTANTLY CHANGING ENVIRONMENT WITH REGARD TO COVID-19 AND THE OLYMPIC GAMES TOKYO 2020. They were joined by Mori Yoshiro, the President of the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee; the Olympic Minister, Hashimoto Seiko; the Governor of Tokyo, Koike Yuriko; the Chair of the IOC Coordination Commission, John Coates; IOC Director General Christophe De Kepper; and the IOC Olympic Games Executive Director, Christophe Dubi. President Bach and Prime Minister Abe expressed their shared concern about the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, and what it is doing to people’s lives and the significant impact it is having on global athletes’ preparations for the Games. In a very friendly and constructive meeting, the two leaders praised the work of the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee and noted the great progress being made in Japan to fight against COVID-19. 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. The leaders agreed that the Olympic Games in Tokyo could stand as a beacon of hope to the world during these troubled times and that the Olympic flame could become the light at the end of the tunnel in which the world finds itself at present. Therefore, it was agreed that the Olympic flame will stay in Japan. It was also agreed that the Games will keep the name Olympic and Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020. ### The International Olympic Committee is a not-for-profit independent international organisation made up of volunteers, which is committed to building a better world through sport. It redistributes more than 90 per cent of its income to the wider sporting movement, which means that every day the equivalent of 3.4 million US dollars goes to help athletes and sports organisations at all levels around the world. ### For more information, please contact the IOC Media Relations Team: Tel: +41 21 621 6000, email: pressoffice@olympic.org, or visit our web site at www.olympic.org. |
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Post by Admin on Mar 29, 2020 21:11:27 GMT
Olympics 2020 may truly remain the Summer Games.
After the Tokyo Games were officially postponed on March 24 due to the global coronavirus pandemic, the International Olympic Committee announced the event would be rescheduled to a date “beyond 2020 but no later than summer 2021.” Now, Olympics organizers appear to be leaning away from starting the rescheduled Games next spring and more toward waiting until the summer of 2021. Organizing committee president Yoshiro Mori suggested there would be no major changes.
“The Games are meant to be in summer, so we should be thinking of a time between June and September,” Mori said Saturday, according to Kyodo, a Japanese news agency.
Mori suggested decisions regarding the Tokyo Olympics, which were supposed to open on July 24 and close on Aug. 9, could be made as early as this week when the organizing committee’s executive board meets.
Local organizers, the IOC, sponsors, sports federations and broadcasters will all have a say in the final decision.
The cost of rescheduling is expected to be “enormous,” somewhere between $2 billion and $3 billion, according to Mori and organizing committee CEO Toshiro Muto. Several levels of Japanese government are likely to foot most of the bills. One estimate has Tokyo losing $5.7 billion as a result of the postponement.
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Post by Admin on Mar 30, 2020 20:38:08 GMT
The Tokyo Olympics will be held from July 23 to Aug. 8 in 2021, organizers said Monday, after they were forced to make an unprecedented decision last week to postpone the quadrennial sporting extravaganza for about a year in response to the global coronavirus pandemic.
The Paralympic Games will take place between Aug. 24 and Sept. 5, 2021 in the Japanese capital, said the organizers, who decided from among several proposed time frames, including springtime, to avoid major conflicts with the international sports calendar.
"The first-ever postponement of the games has brought up challenges and problems. But I'm sure that deciding the new dates quickly will allow us to speed up our preparations," Tokyo Games organizing committee President Yoshiro Mori told a press conference in Tokyo after agreeing on the new schedule with the International Olympic Committee in a teleconference.
"We also thought it will take time to hold qualifications and for the athletes to prepare for them," said Mori, given that more than 40 percent of competitors were yet to book their spots for the Olympics, initially due to begin July 24.
He said that a longer delay was necessary to fight the pneumonia-causing virus, and added that staging the Olympics and Paralympics during the summer vacation will allow more ticket holders to watch the sports at venues and more volunteers to assist with operations.
"Now that we have decided, we have an unwavering resolve to go forward," Mori said.
The organizing committee's CEO, Toshiro Muto, said he expects that the competition schedule will not change drastically from the one planned for this summer.
While staging the games in the summer of 2021 was considered a challenge because it may overlap with the swimming and athletics world championships, Muto said the IOC has determined that it is possible to move the dates of the worlds.
IOC President Thomas Bach said in a statement, "With this announcement, I am confident that, working together with the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee, the Tokyo metropolitan government, the Japanese government and all our stakeholders, we can master this unprecedented challenge."
A task force established by the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee charged with handling the delay opted for a similar time frame in 2021 in order to use existing plans for the games as much as possible.
The announcement of the new dates, approved by the IOC Executive Board, was welcomed by athletes as well as officials from the municipalities that will stage the Olympic and Paralympic events.
In Sapporo, which is scheduled to hold the marathon and race walking events, Masayuki Nakata, a city official in charge of sports, said he is relieved to hear that the Olympics will take place during the summer.
"It is easier for us to prepare because it will take place during the same time of year," he said.
A town official in Ichinomiya, Chiba Prefecture, which will stage the surfing competitions, said, "All we need to do is continue with our preparations. We need to notify the residents who live near the beach and others involved, but I do not think it will be a problem because the season is the same."
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Post by Admin on Apr 8, 2020 5:09:00 GMT
Simone Biles is the most decorated American gymnast ever and probably the most dominant active athlete in the world. Last October, she won her fifth all-around title at the World Championships, part of a five-medal blitz that brought her career total of gold medals at the Worlds to 19 — more than double the total of any other female gymnast in history. This summer, she was set to continue that run at the Olympics in Tokyo … until the coronavirus changed the entire landscape of sports. With the Olympics now postponed until 2021, Biles continues to train but hasn’t officially committed to competing, citing the mental strain of focusing on peak performance for 15 more months — along with her ongoing frustrations with how USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body, addressed the abuse she and many fellow athletes suffered at the hands of former team physician Larry Nassar.  Biles would be favored to win many gold medals no matter when the Olympics were held; she hasn’t lost an all-around competition she entered since 2013. But she will also be 24 next summer, which is practically ancient for a gymnast. Because of her age — and the Olympics schedule during her career — we might only ever see Biles compete in one Summer Games. “The physical part is not going to be the problem,” Biles said of her challenges looking ahead to 2021. And if any athlete were going to defy Father Time, it might be the one who just keeps getting more dominant. But according to data provided by Olympedia.org, only three female artistic gymnasts over the age of 22 have won any sort of Olympic gold since 1972: Elvira Saadi (age 24) and Lyudmila Turishcheva (23) in the team all-around in 1976, and Sanne Wevers (24) on the balance beam in 2016. The oldest to win the individual all-around gold in that time frame was Simona Amânar in 2000, just weeks shy of her 21st birthday. |
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Post by Admin on Apr 8, 2020 20:57:09 GMT
The first major domino tipped in the wake of the Olympic postponement on Wednesday when track leaders rescheduled next year’s world championships for July 2022, setting up a busy summer for a sport that would normally be taking a breather. The new dates for the event in Eugene, Oregon, are July 15-24, 2022. Track worlds are one of the largest global sporting events this side of the Olympics, drawing around 1,800 athletes from more than 200 countries. But unlike the International Olympic Committee, which postponed its centerpiece event by exactly 52 weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic, World Athletics had to pick dates to coordinate with other events already on the 2022 calendar. It chose a spot 49 weeks after the original dates of Aug. 6-15, 2021, which are now dates that overlap with the end of the rescheduled Tokyo Games. The Commonwealth Games, which draws athletes from more than 70 countries in a wide array of sports, were already scheduled for July 27-Aug. 7, and the European track championships were previously set for Aug. 15-21.  “This will be a bonanza for athletics fans around the world,” World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said. It will mark the first outdoor world championships held in the United States, with one of the country’s smattering of track hotbeds – Eugene – playing host in a newly renovated and enlarged Hayward Field. The stadium will get its first major test run at the Olympic trials, which will now be held in 2021 on a date still to be determined. The 2022 worlds will be the first to be held in an even-numbered year. They had been held in odd-numbered years since they started in 1983. In addition to packing the 2022 schedule, the delay sets up track and field for a long stretch of yearly major events: the Olympics in 2021, worlds in 2022, then again in 2023 in Budapest, followed by the Paris Olympics in 2024 and another world championship at a site to be determined in 2025. |
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