USA Today reported on Sunday that a vast majority of athletes who participated in a virtual town hall with the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) were in favor of postponing the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The USOPC convened 125 athletes and member of the Athletes Advisory Council for a two-hour meeting on Saturday following pleas from both USA Swimming and USA Track & Field to postpone the Tokyo Games because of the risk of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of the meeting, the attendees were asked three questions:
Do you support the postponement of the 2020 Olympic/Paralympic Games?
Do you support the 2020 Olympic/Paralympic Games going on as scheduled?
When are you comfortable with the IOC making a decision to hold, postpone or cancel the Games?
Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed favored a postponement of the 2020 Olympics versus 23% who said it would depend on the circumstances. 41% of the respondents were not in favor of going ahead as scheduled while 34% needed more information. And 34% declared they were comfortable with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) making its decision as soon as it had enough information to do so, whereas 23% wanted a decision now and 18% were willing to wait until April 15.
The IOC’s president Thomas Bach sent a letter to athletes on Sunday saying that the IOC will have a decision about how to proceed with the Tokyo Olympic Games “within the next four weeks.”
USA Today interviewed 31 of the athletes who participated in the town hall, including Nathan Adrian, who said, “I would have real moral objections, if the situation was the same as it was today, to competing.” Two-thirds of the athletes who spoke to USA Today said they were in favor of postponement and more than half of them said their training had been “severely impacted” by the restrictions placed on them by COVID-19.
The USOPC sent a questionnaire to 4,000 Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls, asking their opinion on what should be done and whether their training has been affected by COVID-19.
On Saturday, the president of the French Swimming Federation asked the IOC to consider postponing the 2020 Games. Swimming Canada also issued a statement supporting postponement.
Adrian told USA Today, “These conversations are definitely getting had,” Adrian said. “They have to be examining best-case, worst-case and medium-case scenarios, and none of us know. That’s the most frustrating part about this.”
Tokyo 2021!