After a year’s delay, the Tokyo Summer Olympics appear set to proceed. The world’s best athletes will once again compete in the pool, on the track, around the velodrome and high above the trampoline. But the circumstances will be most unusual. The Summer Games, scheduled for Tokyo in July and August 2020, were delayed for a year because of the pandemic. The Games are currently scheduled to proceed July 23 to Aug. 8, 2021.  The International Olympic Committee and the Tokyo organizing committee are determined to hold the Games after years of planning. They are also eager to hang on to the billions of dollars in television money that they would lose if the Games were canceled. Organizers say postponing again is not possible.

STILL KNOWN AS OLYMPICS 2020: Despite coming a year late, the Games are still called Tokyo 2020. T-shirts, mugs, signage and other branded gear will all reflect that.

Japanese against Olympics

Around 80 percent of people in Japan think the Games should not go on this summer. It has been over a year since Japan proclaimed its first one-month state of emergency back in April 2020. There have been many outbreaks throughout this year as a direct result of the non-existent COVID-19 mitigation measures. For the entire year of the global pandemic, the Abe and Suga governments focused on downplaying the pandemic, doing everything in their power to ensure the Summer Tokyo Olympics will be held this year in July. This includes covering up the realities in the country’s hospitals. As a result , people of Japan are now protesting and demanding to stop Olympics this summer. On 10th July participants in the demonstration gathered in front of a five-star hotel in the capital, where the International Olympics Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach stays, chanting ‘no more Olympics’.

History

The Olympic Games are an international sports festival that began in ancient Greece. The original Greek games were staged every fourth year for several hundred years, until they were abolished in the early Christian era. The revival of the Olympic Games took place in 1896, and since then they have been staged every fourth year. The ancient Olympics were held every four years between August 6 and September 19 during a religious festival honoring Zeus. The Games were named for their location at Olympia, a sacred site located near the western coast of the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece. Their influence was so great that ancient historians began to measure time by the four-year increments in between Olympic Games, which were known as Olympiads. The first modern Olympics were held in Athens, Greece, in 1896. In the opening ceremony, King Georgios I and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed 280 participants from 13 nations, who would compete in 43 events, including track and field, gymnastics, swimming, wrestling, cycling, tennis, weightlifting, shooting and fencing. The official symbol of the modern Games is five interlocking colored rings, representing the continents of North and South America, Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia. The Olympic flag, featuring this symbol on a white background, flew for the first time at the Antwerp Games in 1920.

Have Olympics been cancelled or postponed before?

Since the opening of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, the international sports competition has never been postponed but only been canceled three times: once during World War I (1916) and twice during World War II (1940, 1944). The 1916 Games were inconveniently scheduled for Berlin when World War I broke out. Those Games, and the Summer Games, which were somehow scheduled for Tokyo, did not happen. The Winter and Summer Games in Italy and Britain in 1944 never happened either.