If the rescheduled Summer Olympics do not take place in Tokyo in 2021, the 2022 Beijing Winter Games will likely also fall victim to the coronavirus pandemic, according to International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound.
Set to be held starting on February 4, 2022, the Beijing Winter Olympics are scheduled to start less than six months after the conclusion of the. Tokyo Summer Games on August 8, 2021.
“Taking the political side out of it for the moment say there is a COVID problem in July and August next year in Tokyo, it is hard to imagine there is not going to be a knock-on effect in the same area five months later,” Pound told Reuters.
If the Games do take place in 2022, Pound floated a conspiracy theory that the Chinese government, for political reasons, may find a way to exclude the U.S. from participating by citing the number of coronavirus cases in America.
“There could be the largest number of cases in the world (in the U.S.) and it would be dangerous having Americans coming to China,” Pound said. “That is an extreme supposition. There are all kinds of crazy things that could happen.”
Prospects for Tokyo in 2021 do not look great at this point as the city recorded 286 new coronavirus cases on Thursday — the highest number of new cases recorded in one day in Japan’s capital since the pandemic began.
However, the mortality rate in Japan has been relatively low as the country has only had 985 deaths to date out of 22,890 recorded cases.
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