OLYMPICS WILL GO AHEAD EVEN UNDER STATE OF EMERGENCY: IOC OFFICIAL

The Tokyo Olympics will go ahead even if the city is under a state of emergency due to Covid-19, a top Olympic official said on Friday, underscoring the challenges facing organisers of the pandemic-hit Games.

With just nine weeks until the Games get underway, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) sought to calm fears in Japan that the event would present a burden to a medical system already under strain from the pandemic at the end of a three-day virtual meeting to discuss preparations.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach will arrive in Japan on July 12 — 11 days before the start of the Tokyo Olympic Games.

In a letter released on the IOC’s official website, John Coates, an IOC Vice President who heads the IOC’s Coordination Commission for the Tokyo Games, said: “The next steps on the organisational front after this Coordination Commission meeting include my arrival in Tokyo on 15 June, to join our team that is already on the ground. As of 12 July, after the arrival of President Bach, we will move to the full Games-time coordination operations.”

The letter was addressed to athletes, sponsors, IOC members, National Olympic Committee (NOC)s and international federations.

Coates reiterated commitments of Bach, Tokyo 2020 organising committee President Seiko Hashimoto, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike and Japanese Olympic Minister Tamayo Marukawa that the postponed Games will be held as scheduled in a safe way.

Bach had originally planned to visit Japan on May 17 and attend the Olympic torch relay in Hiroshima, but his visit was cancelled due to the worsening situation of Covid-19 in Japan.

Coates quoted Michael Ryan, the Executive Director of the World Health Organisation (WHO)’s Health Emergencies Program, as saying, “The issues regarding the Olympics are multi-dimensional…It is not whether we will have [the] Olympics or not; it is how those individual risks within that framework are being managed.”

“This summer the eyes of the world will be on us and on Japan,” Coates said. “We have an obligation, as the Olympic Movement, to all of those involved to do our utmost to make these Games safe and secure, so that these Olympic and Paralympic Games can indeed be the light at the end of the tunnel.”

Japan has vaccinated just 4.1% of its population, the lowest rate among the world’s wealthy countries and only about a half of its medical staff have completed their inoculations. To minimise risk of infections, organisers have cut the number of people coming to participate in the Olympics as part of foreign delegations to 78,000 from about 180,000, Seiko Hashimoto, who runs the organising committee, said.