The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games is declared to be postponed due to the Coronavirus pandemic throughout the world.
Japan’s prime minister and the head of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) agreed to postpone the Tokyo 2020 Games by a year as the world battles the Coronavirus pandemic.
“I proposed to postpone for a year and [IOC] president Thomas Bach responded with 100% agreement,” Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said.
In a joint statement, the organisers of Tokyo 2020 and the IOC said: “The unprecedented and unpredictable spread of the outbreak has seen the situation in the rest of the world deteriorating.” The event will still be called Tokyo 2020 despite taking place in 2021, the IOC said.
The Olympics have never been delayed in their 124-year modern history, though they were cancelled in 1916 at the onset of World War I and in 1940 and 1944 because of World War II. This change in date will bring great relief to the athletes, organizers and health officials who had increasingly pressed that the Coronavirus pandemic made it unsafe to go forward with the event.
