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The2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyomay be called off should the number ofcoronavirus casesaround the world continue to rise, according to a senior member of the International Olympic Committee.
“This is the new war and you have to face it. In and around that time, I’d say folks are going to have to ask: ‘Is this under sufficient control that we can be confident about going to Tokyo, or not?'” he said.
“You could certainly go to two months out if you had to,” he continued. “A lot of things have to start happening. You’ve got to start ramping up your security, your food, theOlympic Village, the hotels, The media folks will be in there building their studios.”
Pound said other alternatives — such as moving the Olympics to another location or dispersing events throughout different cities across the globe — is also not feasible.
“You just don’t postpone something on the size and scale of the Olympics,” he said. “There’s so many moving parts, so many countries and different seasons, and competitive seasons, and television seasons. You can’t just say, `We’ll do it in October.’”
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The IOC is working with the World Health Organization to determine if the 2020 Summer Olympics should proceed as scheduled, though it is currently too early to make a call, Pound said.
“As far as we all know, you’re going to be in Tokyo,” Pound said. “All indications are at this stage that it will be business as usual. So keep focused on your sport and be sure that the IOC is not going to send you into a pandemic situation.”
Should the Olympics be canceled, organizations that depend on revenue from the Olympics for income — including the IOC itself — will draw from an emergency insurance fund of $1 billion that the committee has been building up.
“It’s not an insurable risk, and it’s not one that can be attributed to one or the other of the parties,” Pound said. “So everybody takes their lumps. There would be a lack of revenue on the Olympic movement side.”
As of Feb. 25, there have been 80,134 reported cases of coronavirus worldwide, according to theEuropean Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. Within those cases, 77,658 were reported from mainland China.
source: people.com
