TOKYO – The total cost of holding the Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Tokyo in 2021 will be as high as 1.6 trillion yen (US$15.4 billion), Russian news agency (TASS) quoting Nikkei newspaper reports said.
It said citing sources, Nikkei said the Tokyo 2020 organisational committee will bear the biggest part of the costs (US$6.9 billion). The rest will be covered by the Tokyo authorities (US$6.7 billion) and the Japanese government (US$2.1 billion).
At the same time, around US$2.8 billion had to be spent in light of the postponement to 2021. Moreover, around US$929 million is allocated to prevent the spread of coronavirus at the games.
The Tokyo Olympics were initially supposed to be held between July 24 and August 9, 2020.
Background
It was the middle of March 2020, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, were promoting the Summer Olympics in Tokyo as the balm the world needed to show victory over the coronavirus pandemic.
A few days later, the virus won out.
Bach and Abe bowed to a groundswell of resistance — from athletes, from sports federations, from national Olympic committees, from health experts — and formally postponed the Games, which had been scheduled to begin in late July, until 2021.
The decision brought both a sense of relief and impending chaos to international sports.
Abe broke the news after a phone call with Bach, when complaints that the I.O.C. was not moving quickly enough to adjust to the coronavirus pandemic became too loud to ignore.
The decision — which organizers in Japan resisted the longest, according to people involved with the process — became all but inevitable after the national Olympic committee in Canada announced on Sunday that it was withdrawing from the Games, and Australia’s committee told its athletes that it was not possible to train under the widespread restrictions in place to control the virus.
Brazil and Germany, too, called for postponing the Games. And the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, after initially declining to take a stand, joined the fray urging the I.O.C. to postpone.
In announcing the decision, Abe said that he had asked Bach for a one-year delay and that Bach had “agreed 100 percent.”
It was an extraordinary turnabout: The Olympics have been canceled only because of world wars, in 1916, 1940 and 1944, and have carried on even in the tense climate after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and at the 1972 Munich Olympics, where 17 people died after the quarters of the Israeli team were stormed by Palestinian terrorists.
Bach said the situation had become untenable in recent days as the World Health Organization described the acceleration of the virus in Africa to Olympic leaders. That forced the I.O.C. to shift its focus from whether Japan could be safe at the start of the Games to what was immediately happening in various other countries.
“We had growing confidence in the developments in Japan,” Bach said in a conference call with journalists. “In 4½ months, these safe conditions could be offered. Then we had this big wave coming from the rest of the world.”
As the virus spread, Bach said, athletes began voicing concerns about risking their health to continue training. It became clear that the pandemic was “rocking the nerves of the athletes, and it’s also not a situation we have ever been in,” he said.
Bach said that finalizing the details of a new schedule and negotiating adjustments in the global sports calendar with leaders of international federations, who were caught off guard by the speed of the decision, would take time.
“There are a lot of pieces of a huge and very difficult jigsaw puzzle,” he said.
Yoshiro Mori, the president of the Tokyo organizing committee, said that the scope and the dates of the Games in 2021 were uncertain, but that it was clear that they could not be held anytime in 2020.
