Faster, Higher, Stronger | Tokyo 2020: what are the chances of the Olympics happening next year? Pretty much zero
- How can the Games possibly go ahead in 14 months with the worst still yet ahead for many countries? That hope is fanciful at best
- With Japan extending its state of emergency until the end of May, how can it guarantee everyone’s safety? The whole thing is a minefield
In the 2007 financial crisis the banks were “too big to fail”; 13 years on and amid a very different global crisis the Olympics are too big to succeed.
There were a record 207 nations at the last Games in Rio four years ago and more than 200 at each Games since that barrier was broken at Athens in 2004. Tokyo was expecting 206 and it is a literal A-Z of countries from Afghanistan (first Games in 1936) to Zimbabwe, who have been at every Games since 1980.
Nothing else compares to it on a global scale.
Television figures prove it – of the top 10 most watched events in history, six are for the Olympics, with London and Rio the top two at an estimated 3.6 billion viewers. Only the last Fifa World Cup in Russia in 2018 breaks the Olympics in the top seven.
That is a large part of the problem. The number of people needed outside the athletes and officials is immense.
This is all very different to the situation we are in now with some domestic sporting events resuming. They are behind closed doors, there are protocols in place for training, rules about contact have been enforced. Some leagues are even discussing neutral venues and quarantining all the athletes together.