IOC's Coates pledges that Tokyo Olympics will go ahead ‘with or without COVID’

With next year's Tokyo Olympics identified as the most expensive Summer Games on record, International Olympic Committee (IOC) Vice-President, John Coates has said that the Games will go ahead in 2021 regardless of the status of the Coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking to Agence France-Presse, Coates said that the IOC was committed to staging “the Games that conquered COVID” and that the Olympics would go ahead “with or without COVID”.

Coates, who in mid-March downplayed the impact of the Coronavirus and maintained that they would open as planned on 24th July, advised overnight that the theme of the 2020 Games wil be “‘the Reconstruction Games’, after the devastation of the tsunami” which rocked Japan in 2011. 

He added “now very much these will be the light at the end of the tunnel."

The IOC Executive Committee Member and Australian Olympic Committee President was speaking following the first meeting of the three-party council – of the Japanese Government, the

Tokyo Metropolitan Government and the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee – that was set up to produce “robust countermeasures” to the pandemic to allow the Games to proceed as normally as possible during the next (Northern Hemisphere) summer. 

That will involve a “simplified” version of the Olympics, with Coates having previously stated that the IOC is still targeting having fans in attendance, though only where this can be achieved safely for both spectators, organisers and athletes. 

The next meeting of the task force will focus on that as well as issues of transportation and border control, with the Japanese government still unclear how the pandemic might affect athletes coming into the country to compete and whether they might be expected to quarantine on arrival. 

Coates went on to say "their job now is to look at all the different counter-measures that will be required for the Games to take place.

“Some countries will have it (Coronavirus) under control, some won’t. We’ll have athletes therefore coming from places where it’s under control and some where it is not. There’s 206 teams, so there’s a massive task being undertaken on the Japanese side.”

Coates’ comments follow those of IOC President Thomas Bach earlier this year, who said that the Games will either happen next year or not at all, with no further postponement beyond 2021 possible.

Study shows Tokyo Games will be the most expensive ever
A study from the University of Oxford has claimed that the Tokyo Olympics will be the most expensive Summer Games on record, with expenditure set to increase further due to the one-year postponement.

The study, by academic Bent Flyvbjerg, says the cost of the games is already US$15.84 billion and predicts several billion dollars more to be incurred due to the one-year suspension. The bill exceeds that for the 2012 London Olympics, the previous most expensive summer games at US$14.95 billion.

When Tokyo won the bid in 2013, organisers predicted the cost would be $7.3 billion.

The Associated Press reported that the International Olympic Committee said it had not seen the Oxford study and declined to comment beyond referring to another study by universities in Mainz and the Sorbonne which said the Tokyo costs were in line with other large-scale projects.

Flyvbjerg told the AP that the (IOC) "obviously don’t like our results, but it’s very difficult to counter a piece of rigorous research like this ... and they haven’t done that, and they can’t do that. Our research is a problem for them.”

Flyvbjerg added “The Olympics offer the highest level of risk a city can take on…The trend cannot continue. No city will want to do this because it’s just too expensive, putting themselves into a debt that most cities cannot afford.”

Flyvbjerg’s report, Regression to the Tail: Why the Olympics Blow Up, is due to be published on 15th September.

Images: Jon Coates (top) and t