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A Cancellation Of The Already-Postponed 2021 Tokyo Olympics Could Halt New Sports’ Momentum

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On Thursday evening stateside, the Times of London dropped a bombshell report regarding the already postponed Tokyo Olympics, now set to kick off with the Opening Ceremony in six months.

“The Japanese government has privately concluded that the Tokyo Olympics will have to be cancelled because of the coronavirus,” the report alleged, “and the focus is now on securing the Games for the city in the next available year, 2032.”

On one hand, logically, the report is not shocking. According to the World Health Organization, as of January 21 there have been 96,012,792 confirmed Covid-19 cases worldwide, including 2,075,870 deaths. Cases are spiking around the globe, including in Japan, with numbers worldwide far exceeding what they were when the decision to postpone the Games was made in March 2020.

On the other hand, given that organizers in Japan and International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach have continued to insist all along that the Games will go off as planned—Bach even claimed in November he was “very confident” the Games would allow spectators—the report was the first indication that even these postponed Games could be doomed.

On Thursday, Bach rejected the Times’ report. “We have, at this moment, no reason whatsoever to believe that the Olympic Games in Tokyo will not open on 23 July in the Olympic stadium in Tokyo,” Bach told Japan’s Kyodo News. “This is why there is no plan B and this is why we are fully committed to make these Games safe and successful.”

Japan Olympic Committee head Yasuhiro Yamashita told Reuters the report was “a fabrication.”

First, and most importantly, the people who may be hurt most by the Games not being canceled are the citizens of Japan, who have made their wishes on the matter clear. This month, 77% of of Japanese people polled by NHK said they want the Tokyo Games to be either canceled or further postponed.

Securing an Olympic bid is big business. Tokyo won its bid on September 7, 2013, at the 125th IOC Session in Buenos Aires, having last hosted the Games in 1964 (also Summer Olympics). In April 2012, Tsunekazu Takeda, president of the Japanese Olympic Committee, said hosting the games could generate $2 billion for Tokyo. (Takeda stepped down on March 21, 2019, and resigned from the IOC amid a corruption investigation.)

Polls from 2012 suggested nearly 66% of the country supported the bid for the Tokyo Games, which organizers said when the city was awarded the bid in 2013 would cost around $7.5 billion to stage.

Fast-forward eight years, however, and recent reports suggest the current budget has swelled to $15.4 billion. The Japanese government is responsible for all but $6.7 billion in a privately funded operating budget. If these numbers are true—and an audit by the Japanese government show the costs, which are always underreported, could be as high as $25 million—this would be the most expensive Summer Olympics on record, according to a University of Oxford study titled “Regression to the Tail: Why the Olympics Blow Up.”

“The IOC and TOCOG want the public budget to appear as small as possible not only to guard against public criticism, but also to not discourage future candidate cities,” said Franz Waldenberger, director of the German Institute for Japanese Studies in Tokyo.

Between swelling costs and the continued uncontrolled spread of a global pandemic, it’s no wonder Japanese citizens are concerned about staging an Olympics in six short months. The University of Oxford study likened the statistically variable costs of hosting the Olympics to “deep disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics, and wars.”

It’s all led to increased cries to do away with the bid process altogether and move to a “one city” model wherein the Olympics would be held at the same venue every four years.

It may come down to whether Japan can successfully vaccinate its 127 million citizens in the next six months, an undertaking that will prove difficult. According to the Associated Press, the government has secured enough vaccines for all its citizens and more through deals with the three primary distributors—Pfizer Inc. PFE , AstraZeneca and Moderna Inc. MRNA —but convincing its citizens to buy-in is another matter.

In September, a Lancet study of 149 countries saw Japan ranked among the lowest in vaccine confidence. Less than 25% of Japanese people polled agreed on vaccine safety, importance and effectiveness.

Although the potential cancellation of the Tokyo Games, which organizers continue to reject as a possibility, would be in the best interest of public safety, those who would be hurt the most—who are indeed usually always those with the most to lose in the world of Olympic machinations—are the athletes.

In particular, Tokyo’s bid saw five new sports added to the program for 2020: skateboarding, surfing, karate and sport climbing, which would make their Olympic debuts, and baseball/softball, which would return after their last appearance in 2008. In cycling, freestyle BMX will emerge as a new discipline alongside racing.

While there are legitimate arguments that the Olympics can damage the culture of certain sports—especially action sports, which are often more about individual expression than competition—as they also speed up their development worldwide, one facet of sport the Olympics can undoubtedly improve is gender equality.

For Olympic surfing (20 men and 20 women), skateboarding (40 men and 40 women), sport climbing (20 men and 20 women) and freestyle BMX (9 men and 9 women), there are an equal number of spots available to men and women in all disciplines.

In Japan, 22-year-old climber Miho Nonaka has become something of a celebrity ahead of her country’s Games. She is sponsored by Tag Heuer and Beats by Dre and has appeared in glossy magazine spreads. With her career on the cusp of exploding internationally, Nonaka is the exact kind of homegrown athlete Japan hopes to promote through the Games—and the exact kind who would suffer from the Games’ cancelation.

It’s no secret that sports like skateboarding, surfing and freestyle BMX have long struggled with accessibility and diversity, especially at the higher levels of competition, when it comes to big-name sponsors and big-money prize purses.

After the IOC announced in August 2016 these sports would debut on the medal program in 2020, however, the change in earning power that had been creeping in over the last decade went into hyperdrive.

In surfing, women have long lagged behind their male counterparts in opportunities, exposure and pay. But that is changing rapidly. This year sees the launch of Red Bull Magnitude, the first-ever women’s only big wave event of its kind. Red Bull Magnitude is open to any female athlete who wants to join from now through February. Athletes submit a video of their rides, with winners across five categories taking home $40,000.

This kind of open and egalitarian competition is a blueprint for how action sports will look in the future, and it’s no coincidence surfing will be debuting in Tokyo and has also been confirmed for the program of the Paris 2024 Games.

Soon, adaptive surfing may also join the ranks of the Paralympics, empowering a new community of surfers to support themselves through their sport. Para Surfing won’t debut in the 2024 Paralympics alongside surfing, but the infrastructure is being built.

“What the Paralympics would do for adaptive surfing and just the world in general, with increasing visibility and acknowledging the issues with accessibility to the beach and to the oceans, would be astronomical, and I would stand by that any day for sure,” World Adaptive Surfing Champion Dani Burt told me. “I truly hope that ISA will continue to pursue adaptive surfing into the Paralympics.”

To get there, however, surfing needs to continue riding the wave of momentum into the 2021 Games.

Meanwhile, in freestyle BMX, women still do not have a medal event alongside men at Summer X Games, though they continue to lobby ESPN to add one. Women’s freestyle BMX debuting in the 2021 Olympics would almost certainly push that conversation to the forefront.

In 2015, Nike SB NKE   NKE  signed its first female pro skater, Brazil’s Leticia Bufoni. The following year, Adidas signed Nora Vasconcellos to its skateboarding team.

Mariah Duran, 24, is the top-ranked American female skater in the Olympic world skateboarding rankings. The qualification process has been interrupted by the qualifying events being put on hold due to Covid-19, but it’s almost certain Duran will represent the United States at the next Summer Games.

Only a few years ago, Duran was slinging pizzas in her hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to support herself. In 2018, she signed with Adidas. The next year, she became the first female skateboarder signed to the MTN DEW team.

“The Olympics definitely was a big factor in getting a lot of the bigger companies to come onboard in a legitimate way, contracting out female skaters, like Nike, Adidas, Vans, all the big footwear brands, Mountain Dew, Converse,” Knoop told me. “I know for a fact a lot of that was Olympic-driven, just because they are going to have women in that space.”

Many sponsors have stuck by their athletes during the pandemic, supporting their training even as contests have ground to a halt. These sponsors are the lifeblood of action sports, which don’t benefit from guaranteed contracts and base salaries the way the major five North American leagues do.

Team USA TISI athletes, likewise, are not supported by the U.S. the way other countries fund their national teams at a governmental level. They rely on the support of individuals and, of course, their sponsors.

In March 2020, action sports athletes and Team USA Olympic hopefuls told me about the ways the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games shook up their lives—and livelihoods.

Even though sponsors have done the right thing and kept many of their athletes going during this difficult time, those relationships are still predicated on a return of investment.

Sponsoring an Olympic hopeful is smart business; all four snowboarding medalists at the PyeongChang 2018 Games were Americans (Red Gerard, men’s slopestyle; Jamie Anderson, women’s slopestyle; Shaun White, men’s halfpipe; Chloe Kim, women’s halfpipe), and the men’s halfpipe final propelled NBC and NBC Sports Network to its “most dominant Winter Games Tuesday night ever,” posting a Total Audience Delivery average of 22.6 million viewers.

It’s those post-competition podium appearances, where athletes name-drop their sponsors and express gratitude for their support, that every brand hopes will be the end result of a sponsorship relationship. As things stand, these sponsors can see that happen at events like X Games, Dew Tour, the SLS World Tour and the Vans US Open.

But the Olympics is in another stratosphere. A cancelation of the 2021 Olympic Games would be devastating, financially and professionally, to the young athletes—many in their early teens—who have been training to qualify for the debut of these disciplines in the Games.

To be sure, it’s not only the Olympics that has the power to elevate athletes and push for equality in sport. In skateboarding, former pro Mimi Knoop, pioneering female skater Cara-Beth Burnside and former agent Drew Mearns founded the Action Sports Alliance, a non-profit of professional women in action sports, in 2005.

That same year, female skateboarders organized to boycott X Games, where the prize purse for the men was 25 times that of the women, as reported by the New York Times NYT . Burnside, Knoop and Mearns met with ESPN executives in 2006 to discuss an increase in women’s prize money and to bring organization of women’s skateboarding competitions under the control of the Action Sports Alliance. In 2008, ESPN announced X Games would achieve prize purse parity starting in 2009.

The Olympics are a steroid injection to organic growth of sports, but those who have been organizing skateboarding, BMX and surfing before the IOC ever came calling have proven to be worthy stewards of their athletes’ futures.

If the Olympics are indeed canceled in the name of public health, these sports’ governing bodies will continue to invest in their athletes and take advantage of every opportunity for growth until the next Games is staged.

“[Skateboarding has] been growing the whole time on its own, organically, so it’s nice for us to see that happen,” Knoop said.

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