The Tokyo Olympic Games are poised to rack up nearly $3 billion in additional expenses after being postponed until 2021.
The organizing committee for the Tokyo Olympics met with members of the Japanese government and the local Tokyo metropolitan government to agree on how the projected $2.8 billion in additional costs brought on both by delaying the games and by introducing new coronavirus-related safety measures would be allocated.
“I think our biggest challenge is the additional costs,” Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike told reporters. “This is a crucial issue in order for us to prepare for the Olympics. We need to gain the understanding and sympathy of the people of Tokyo and the people of Japan.”
Few of the additional costs will be covered by the International Olympic Committee, which primarily generates revenues from selling broadcast rights and sponsorships, according to ABC News.
Instead, the bulk of the expenses, roughly $1.1 billion, will be covered by the Tokyo city government. The Tokyo 2020 committee, which is privately funded, will pick up an additional $700 million, plus $300 million that had been already allocated in a previous version of the budget. The remaining costs will be picked up by the government of Japan.
Toshiro Muto, the chief of the organizing committee, said the committee was seeking new domestic sponsors to help cover the new expenses. Tokyo has already received more than $3 billion worth of private sponsorships, roughly double that of any previous Olympic games.
Muto also said that he no longer expected to receive a $650 million sum from the International Olympic Committee that its president, Thomas Bach, alluded to months ago.
“There was an expectation that maybe this was for Tokyo,” Muto said. “But Tokyo’s costs are Tokyo’s costs.”
The Tokyo Olympics were supposed to be held from July 24 to Aug. 9 but were postponed in March amid the first surge of the coronavirus pandemic. The games have since been rescheduled for the summer of 2021, but in April, Tokyo 2020 President Yoshiro Mori said that event would be canceled if the coronavirus “remains an issue” ahead of the rescheduled date.
The Olympics have never been postponed in modern times. However, they were canceled in 1916, 1940, and 1944, during World War I and World War II.
Polling in Japan has been mixed on whether the postponed games should be held, as the increasing costs of delays fall mainly on the public, not to mention the prospect of inviting 11,000 Olympians, 4,350 Paralympic athletes, tens of thousands of judges, officials, media, and other VIPs, and an unknown number of guests and tourists to the island nation that has so far managed to avoid the large-scale coronavirus cases and deaths seen across the world, particularly in the United States.
Japan, with roughly one-third the population of the U.S., according to Worldometer, has nearly 14 million fewer positive COVID-19 cases than the U.S. Japan has also recorded only 2,210 deaths related to the coronavirus compared to the U.S.’s 276,000, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
