Tokyo: The Tokyo Olympics will open next year in the same time slot scheduled for this year’s games. Tokyo organizers said Monday the opening ceremony will take place July 23, 2021 — almost exactly one year after the Games were due to start this year.
Last week, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Japanese organisers postponed the Olympics until 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic.
This year’s games were scheduled to open July 24 and close August 9. But the near exact one-year delay will see the rescheduled closing ceremony August 8.
There had been talk of switching the Olympics to spring, a move that would coincide with the blooming of Japan’s famous cherry blossoms. But it would also clash with European soccer and North American sports leagues.
After holding out for weeks, local organisers and the IOC last week postponed the Tokyo Games under pressure from athletes, national Olympic bodies and sports federations. It’s the first peacetime postponement in Olympic history, though there were several cancellations during wartime.
Both Tokyo organising committee president Yoshiro Mori and CEO Toshiro Muto have said the cost of rescheduling will be ‘massive’ – local reports estimate billions of dollars — with most of the expenses borne by Japanese taxpayers.
Muto promised transparency in calculating the costs, and testing times deciding how they are divided up.
“Since it (the Olympics) were scheduled for this summer, all the venues had given up hosting any other events during this time, so how do we approach that,” Muto said. “In addition, there will need to be guarantees when we book the new dates, and there is a possibility this will incur rent payments. So there will be costs incurred and we will need to consider them one by one. I think that will be the tougher process,” he added.
Katsuhiro Miyamoto, an emeritus professor of sports economics at Kansai University here, put the costs as high as $4 billion. That would cover the price of maintaining stadiums, refitting them, paying rentals, penalties and other expenses.
Japan is officially spending $12.6 billion to organize the Olympics. However, an audit bureau of the Japanese government has said the costs are twice that of the declared amount. All of the spending is public money except $5.6 billion from a privately funded operating budget.
AFP