Tokyo 2020 rescheduling ‘caused sleepless nights’, reveals Olympics chief Thomas Bach
The IOC president said the cancellation of the Olympics Games due to Covid-19 “would have been easy” but was never an option
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Your support makes all the difference.The president of the International Olympic Committee [IOC] Thomas Bach has revealed he went through “sleepless nights” and had “doubts every day” over the rescheduling of the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Bach reaffirmed that the cancellation of the games was “never an option” for the IOC, as coronavirus cases continue to rise in Japan.
The head of the Tokyo Olympics organising committee Toshiro Muto has not ruled out a last-minute cancellation of the Olympics, which starts on Friday.
The Olympics were postponed in March 2020 due to Covid-19 and the rescheduling during a pandemic has continued to pose difficulties for athletes and organisers alike.
“I can admit that we did not know how complex this would be,” Bach said in a speech in Tokyo. “There was no blueprint. Nobody had ever done this before.
“Over the past 15 months, we had to take daily decisions on very uncertain grounds. We had doubts every day. We deliberated and discussed. There were sleepless nights. Like everyone else in the world, we did not know, I did not know, what the future would hold.
“Imagine for a moment what it would have meant if the leader of the Olympic movement, the IOC, would have added to the already many doubts surrounding the Olympic Games. It would have poured fuel on to this fire.
“Our doubts could have become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Olympic Games could have fallen to pieces. That is why we had to keep these doubts to ourselves.”
The IOC has continued to be defiant despite the first reports of Covid-19 cases in the Olympic Village. A Czech beach volleyball player became the third athlete to test positive on Monday, following two South African footballers.
But Bach insisted that rescheduling the Olympics was the right thing to do and that the games would never have been cancelled under his watch.
“We did it together. We did it for the athletes,” Bach said ahead of the start of the Olympics. “The IOC never abandons the athletes.
“Cancellation would have been the easy way for us. We could have drawn on the insurance that we had at the time and moved on to Paris 2024.
“But in fact, cancellation was never an option for us.”
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