Olympics: Tokyo Games may never happen, says John Coates

John Coates believes there is a real chance the Tokyo Games will never be held as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the globe.

John Coates says if the Tokyo Games don’t happen in 2021, they will be cancelled

Senior international Olympics official John Coates believes there is a real chance the Tokyo Games will never be held as the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the globe.

The veteran sports administrator, a member of the IOC, said organisers were being faced with “real problems” to host the Tokyo Olympics next July.

Coates warned if the Games could not be held then, they would not happen at all.

Speaking at a News Corp roundtable of sporting executives, Coates said even if a virus vaccine was approved for human use before next July, it might not be enough to save the Games.

Tokyo had originally been scheduled to hold the Games from July 24 this year, before the Games were postponed in late March after countries began withdrawing their teams.

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“We’ve got real problems because we’ve got athletes having to come from 206 different nations,” Coates said. “Yesterday there was 10,000 new cases in Brazil. Very few countries are as advanced in coping with this as us. We’ve got 11,000 athletes coming, 5000 technical officials and coaches, 20,000 media, we’ve got 4000 working on the organising committee there at the moment and there will be 60,000 volunteers coming. There’s a lot of people.

“The games can only happen in 2021. We can’t postpone it again and we have to assume that there won’t be a vaccine or, if there is a vaccine, it won’t be sufficient to share around the world.”

Coates said October loomed as crunch time to assess the likelihood of Tokyo being able to host the Olympic Games next year.

Coates said his biggest regret this year had been that the IOC had not called off this year’s Olympic Games earlier, having seen virus outbreaks happening in Japan in February.