-By Saidu Abubakar
With about two months to the commencement of the Tokyo Olympics, a probable cancellation is looming over the quadrennial Games.
Valuechain gathered that as Japan battles a fourth wave of coronavirus infections and a state of emergency in Tokyo and other prefectures remains in place until the end of the month, there is mounting pressure from health experts, business leaders and the Japanese public to call off the Games.
The Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association, an organisation of about 6,000 doctors in Tokyo, penned a letter calling for a cancellation, while a petition, which garnered 350,000 signatures in nine days in support of a cancellation, has been submitted to the Games’ organisers.
In the open letter to Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, dated May 14, and posted online on Monday (May 17), the Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association said hospitals in the host city “have their hands full, and have almost no spare capacity.
“We strongly request that the authorities convince the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that holding the Olympics is difficult and obtain its decision to cancel the Games,” the letter said.
Also, within the same week the letter was issued, the CEO of leading Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten said that holding the Games amid the pandemic amounts to a “suicide mission” – among the strongest opposition so far voiced by a business leader.
However, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has remained adamant that the Olympics, already postponed by a year amid the pandemic, will be able to get underway on July 23.
The organisers have released a playbook, the final version of which is expected next month, outlining a series of countermeasures that they say will ensure the Games can take place in a safe and secure way, even as thousands of athletes from around the world descend on Tokyo.
With the Winter Olympics in Beijing now less than a year away, officials have also said that the Games would not be postponed again. They maintained that a cancellation would be the likeliest option, if it was deemed unsafe to hold the Games from the rescheduled start date in July.
How would a cancellation come about?
In the host city contract, which outlines the legal agreement between the IOC and Tokyo to host the Games, the IOC is entitled to terminate the contract on the grounds that “the safety of participants in the Games would be seriously threatened or jeopardised for any reason whatsoever”.
According to legal expert, Jack Anderson, there was likely to be growing pressure on the organisers that forces a cancellation – a “political decision”, rather than a strictly legal one.
“It’s the safety of those athletes, which are a primary concern of the IOC, the safety of the Japanese public, the primary concern of the organising committee and the Japanese political establishment, which is the key. And this is not an ordinary one-off event. It is obviously a huge multidisciplinary event across many different stadia,” Anderson, a professor of Law, teaching at Melbourne Law School in Australia, told CNN Sport.
Anderson added that a termination of the host city contract would see the risks and losses fall largely with the organising committee, which is mandated to take out insurance for the Games.
“In that way, it’s straightforward. But of course, in other ways it’s not straightforward because it’s not simply a contract between the International Olympic Committee and the host organising.
“We have sponsorship contracts, we have broadcasting, we have hospitality, we have a range – a contractual web of liabilities – that are in place here. It’s a huge contractual issue and would have huge insurance ramifications, if it were to not go ahead,” he said.
According to a Reuters report from January, insurers are facing a $2-3 billion loss, if the Olympics are canceled, amounting to the largest ever claim in the global event cancellation market.
And for organisers, the financial impact of canceling the Games, even with insurance payouts, could be considerable given that close to 75 per cent of the IOC’s total funding comes from broadcasting rights.
“The International Olympic Committee – while it is now a very rich organisation – its wealth is predicated on its primary asset, which is hosting the Games. Therefore, not to have a Games, and the knock-on effect that has for sponsorship, for broadcasting, would be huge. It would be difficult to measure that. But I think you could comfortably say that insurance alone would not cover it in terms of reputation and economic damage,” Anderson explained.
What about the athletes?
Arguably, it would be the athletes who would miss out most from a canceled Olympics.
World Athletics President, Seb Coe, said that 70 per cent of those chasing Olympic participation are only going to have one chance to compete at what is likely to be the pinnacle of their sporting careers.
To cancel the Games, Coe said, would be to “discard a generation of athletes who have spent over half their young lives in pursuit of this one moment.”
The other issue when it comes to athletes is that countries around the world are at different stages of pandemic recovery, and have varying access to vaccines, although Coe said he thinks “the bulk of the world will be at the Games”.
With public pressure to cancel the Games mounting, Japanese Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga, said that he has “never put (the) Olympics” as a priority.
“My priority has been to protect the lives and health of the Japanese population. We must first prevent the spread of the virus,” he said.
Valuechain recalls that the Olympics have been cancelled on three previous occasions: in 1916, 1940 and 1944, each time because of world wars.