Coronavirus: USA Swimming joins Australian call to postpone Tokyo Olympics
Australia led the way and now USA Swimming has joined the chorus of sporting bodies urging Olympic officials to speak up for the athletes and postpone the Tokyo Games.
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The tide is turning against the Tokyo Olympics going ahead this year.
Sporting federations and athletes from around the world have suddenly found their voice and are telling the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to postpone the biggest sporting event on the planet until the COVID-19 pandemic is under control.
How long that will take, nobody is quite sure, which is why the IOC is urging patience, insisting there’s no need to rush into a decision because the Games aren’t due to start for another 18 weeks.
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But the IOC’s stance that it’s business as usual is looking increasingly tone-deaf and isn’t washing with anyone any longer and the call to arms by Swimming Australia — one of the first major federations to break ranks with Olympic officials — is being answered.
USA Swimming — the sport’s most successful and powerful national federation — has gone a step further and called for the Games to be postponed until 2021.
So has Bob Bowman, the coach of the greatest Olympian of all-time, Michael Phelps.
Usain Bolt’s coach has also pleaded for the Games to be delayed.
As has UK Athletics. And the Norwegian Olympic Committee. And even members of the IOC.
And the protests are only getting started. Wait til the death toll increases.
The Olympics have survived boycotts before so the IOC won’t be swayed by political pressure but the concerns raised by athletes – that fairness has been compromised because so many athletes are under lockdown – will strike a nerve.
The IOC regards its core principles as sacrosanct so when sporting federations are asking for the Games to be postponed because of shared values, the IOC takes that seriously.
“The right and responsible thing to do is to prioritize everyone’s health and safety and appropriately recognize the toll this global pandemic is taking on athletic preparations. It has transcended borders and wreaked havoc on entire populations, including those of our respected competitors,” USA Swimming chief executive Tim Hinchey wrote in an open letter.
USA Swimming respectfully requests that the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee advocate for the postponement of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. pic.twitter.com/q5bhUwi05q
— USA Swimming (@USASwimming) March 20, 2020
“Everyone has experienced unimaginable disruptions, mere months before the Olympic Games, which calls into question the authenticity of a level playing field for all.”
USA Swimming’a are more significant than most.
The American broadcaster NBC is one of the IOC’s biggest sources of revenue and the US swim team is their top rating sport, boasting a star-studded line-up that includes Katie Ledecky, Caeleb Dressel, Simone Manuel and Lily King.
The Dolphins are Team USA’s biggest rivals in the pool — so much so that NBC secretly travelled to Queensland in the Summer to spend two days filming and interviewing Aussie teenager Ariarne Titmus — who beat the seemingly invincible Ledecky at last year’s world championships.
Their showdown in the 400m freestyle was supposed to be one of the biggest blockbuster races of the entire Tokyo Olympics but has already been compromised with Ledecky having to train in a 25-yard pool because all the 50m pools where she lives have been shut because of the lockdown.
What started as a trickle of federations and individuals calling for the Games to be delayed has now become a flood with the coach who masterminded Phelps to unscaled heights declaring that it was just plain dangerous for athletes to ask athletes to train when all the advice from health was to stay in isolation.
“My concern is as they are trying to find places to train and work out, it goes against what we’re supposed to be doing to not get the coronavirus,” Bowman told USA TODAY Sports.
“It’s forcing them to try to do things that are contrary to our national goal right now.
“I think there’s a higher calling than just your athletic goals. It forces people to kind of work around those and that’s not good.”
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Australian sprint queen Bronte Campbell said it was impossible for elite swimmers, who typically spend around 30 hours a week in the pool, to perform at their peak if they were unable to train for weeks on end in the lead up to an Olympics.
She told The Daily Telegraph she had serious reservations about the integrity of the Olympics if it meant foreign swimmers weren’t given a fair opportunity.
“Faster, higher, stronger — that’s what the Olympics is all about and that holds a lot of weight for me because you want to turn up on the global stage and everyone is at their best and everyone’s competing,” she said.
“It’s huge for us not being in the water because we never spend any longer than 36 hours out of the pool, otherwise you start to lose the feel.
“It’s a very specific sport so losing a month of training four months out is enormous.”
Dolphins’ call a victory for people power
Slammed in years gone by for being aloof and out of touch, Australia’s swimmers’ impassioned call to arms during the greatest crisis facing this generation could end up being worth more than any number of gold medals won in the pool.
Less than a year after Mack Horton’s historic protest against disgraced Chinese cheat Sun Yang sent a message to officials that swimmers want their voices heard — the plea by the Dolphins for the IOC to reconsider whether it was fair to proceed with the Tokyo Games when swimmers from other countries can’t train is another victory for people power.
What’s all the more incredible though is that Australia’s swimmers could pay the biggest penalty if their request is granted because, unlike their main rivals, Australia’s Olympic preparations haven’t suffered much at all because of the COVID-19 outbreak.
“We are talking at the moment from Australia from a position of strength,” the Dolphins’ head coach Jacco Verhaeren said. “We are nowhere near to the circumstances that other countries, athletes and coaches are exposed to at the moment.”
Not yet, anyway, but the Dutchman is warning everyone to prepare for the worst after speaking to other teams in Europe about how quickly the outbreak has shut down high-performance centres overseas.
Next month’s Australian championships and national age-group titles have already been cancelled and there are growing fears for the Olympic trials, due to be held in Adelaide in June.
No decisions have been made yet but Swimming Australia is already looking at a range of radical contingency plans, including reducing the number of entrants to keep numbers down or having time trials held at different pools across the country to ensure swimmers don’t have to travel.
“We just started those discussions with the athlete leaders and coaches today. We don’t have the answer yet, and the solution, but we are definitely planning for Plan B scenarios,” Verhaeren said.
“If all pools close, we have to look at an entirely different way of qualifying athletes and obviously we need to discuss this with the AOC and it needs to meet IOC regulations as well.
“We are basically preparing for everything. We are not assuming, although we hope, that we could swim trials just as it is set up right now.”