SALT LAKE CITY — With the specter of the coronavirus hanging over them, Olympic officials are facing the possibility of canceling the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Dick Pound of the International Olympic Committee said recently that the Games are more likely to be canceled than moved from the original schedule, July 24 to Aug. 9.
The loss of the world’s biggest sports event doesn’t count for much under the circumstances, but it’s another indication of the seriousness of the illness and the impact it is having on the world. The modern Olympics have been canceled only three times and then only because of world war in 1916, 1940 and 1944.
The Games have been threatened on other occasions. The 1936 Summer Games were held in Berlin as Hitler’s Nazis were warming up for war, and it proved to be the only Olympics for the next 12 years. The infamous terrorist attack that left 11 dead at the 1976 Summer Games in Munich imperiled those Olympics. There were two half-Olympics thanks to the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games and the retaliatory Russian-led boycott of the 1984 LA Games. The 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games took place just five months after 9/11 when the host country was scheming revenge and war.
But the risks of a post-9/11 world or even Nazis are different than the risks of a virulent illness. It’s subtle and troublesome to detect and control; it can get out of control as fast as a brush fire in August, with people converging on one place by the thousands from around the world and then taking their germs home with them.
There was an outbreak of the norovirus at the 1988 Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, that was resistant even to hand sanitizer. It infected hundreds of athletes — they had to withdraw from competition — and thousands of journalists. In the months before the 2016 Rio Olympics, Brazil was ground zero for a Zika virus outbreak that had left 165,000 ill. That prospect was frightening enough that some athletes refused to compete. The Olympics in Vancouver in 2010 and Beijing in 2008 also were threatened by flu outbreaks.
What if it had been the coronavirus?
If the coronavirus is not considered sufficiently contained by the time the 2020 Olympics are scheduled to begin, cancellation might be the only option. Rescheduling the Games is considered unworkable. The decision to cancel or proceed with the Games probably must be made in May, according to one Olympic official.
The ramifications are immense. Tokyo is spending between $20 and $27 billion on the Olympics — depending on whose report you read — which is considerably more than the original $7 billion bid (an old story). And now these Games might never happen.
Aside from the finances, there will be losses that can’t be quantified. The Olympic window doesn’t remain open long for most athletes, and this might be the loss of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Mary Decker Slaney, the greatest female runner the U.S. has ever produced, was primed for gold in 1980 but didn’t get to compete because of the U.S.-led boycott. In the 1984 Games, she was tripped in the middle of her race and fell to the track, injured. The 1983 two-time world champion never did win an Olympic medal.
The U.S. has a superb trio of young sprinters who are just reaching their prime in Noah Lyles, Christian Coleman and Michael Norman just as Usain Bolt has left the scene. Shelby Houlihan is on the threshold of becoming the next big thing for American distance running. All of the above might miss the Games, and who knows how they’ll be performing when the next Olympics come around.
Tokyo’s tenuous situation and outrageous expenditures are a reminder that the Olympic model is flawed and foolish. Every two years, a host city spends billions of dollars on winter and summer Olympic facilities and infrastructure. You could pave half of Europe with all the abandoned Olympic facilities that are scattered and rotting around the world. If every Olympic cheerleader from the local chamber of commerce who had promised “economic development” were stacked end to end, they would reach the moon.
You could start the stack in Rio, where the governor declared the Rio Games a “financial disaster” and a “state of calamity,” and this was months before the Games began. They wound up costing $13 billion — about three times the original projections. Rio went broke after the Games and a year later still owed creditors $40 million.
Meanwhile, according to Fortune, the IOC walked away with $5.7 billion in its last four-year Olympic cycle.
It would make more sense to choose a permanent site or, even better, several permanent sites — say, London or Paris, Los Angeles, Sydney, Athens and Buenos Aires for the Summer Games, and Salt Lake, Calgary, Sapporo, Chamonix, Innsbruck (there are plenty of good European hosts) for the Winter Games. It would save cities from making ridiculous financial investments in something that is increasingly risky and costly (the financial success of the Salt Lake Winter Games was the exception, not the rule). It also would eliminate much of the graft and corruption that accompanies bidding processes.
If the 2020 Summer Games are canceled — or even if they’re not — the IOC should reconsider the future of rotating host cities.