Bittersweet Olympic postponement

by Anmar Goodridge-Boyce

POSTPONEMENT of the Olympic Games could be a bittersweet pill for the Barbados Olympic Association (BOA).

BOA president Sandra Osborne said yesterday with a proposed date for next year on the cards, an increase or decrease in athletes making the qualifying requirements to compete in Japan was likely.

During an interview hours after the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced the decision to put off the summer games due to the threat of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 which has claimed more than 16 500 lives globally, Osborne said several factors must now be considered.

BOA President Sandra Osborne.

“The reality is that the athletes who were potential qualifiers may change. There may be people who are not able to sustain training for another year and then there are others who may come on the horizon who maybe able to go.

“It all goes down to what the qualifying criteria is. We have no idea what that will look like. A lot needs to be resolved within the next couple of months,” Osborne said.

Earlier this week, the IOC had given itself a four-week deadline to consider delaying the event scheduled for July 24 to August 9 but pressure mounted on its president, Thomas Bach, as several athletes and National Olympic Committees demanded a swifter response.

On Sunday, Canada became the first major country to withdraw from the Olympics closely followed by Australia and Great Britain.

After a call between Bach and Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, both said the Games would move to summer 2021 at the latest in a hoped-for celebration of triumph over the pandemic.

“Sport is not the most important thing right now, preserving human life is,” Bach said. “This Olympic flame will be the light at the end of this tunnel.”

The postponement will be a blow to Japan, which has invested $12 billion in the run-up to the Games but Osborne said Barbados supported the postponement.

“I think that given the speed with which this pandemic is escalating and spreading and the inability of many athletes to train properly and the uncertainty around everything that was happening and the potential risk with health and safety, I think all of those led me to believe this was the right decision.

“A week ago, I don’t think we could have anticipated that things would have moved so quickly but it happened. The pandemic does not seem to be slowing down. It is a decision that protects the most important people in the Olympic movement who are the athletes,” she said.

The BOA head insisted that the well-being of Barbadian athletes was the main worry.

“At the end of the day, our main concern is the safety of our athletes. I think it is good for all concerned. Our position was that we were waiting on the IOC to work through the various issues. Overall, it is best for our athletes.”

“I think that the big issue for me as far as I see it, is how do we transition from the original date to the new date. There are several things that have to be changed and resolved. It is early days in terms of what it will look like because there are some things to be done to accommodate the new date,” Osborne added.

She revealed the BOA would now go back to the drawing board in preparation for 2021.

“We have to do analyses. It means looking at our athletes who were potential qualifiers and we had a number of athletes on our radar. They came from seven different sports. It is important for us to now look and understand their plans for the next year. It has implications because an athlete who is training for a 2020 event is presented with completely different issues if you say the event is now one year later. We have to work through a number of things in terms of how our athletes prepare,” she explained.

The coronavirus outbreak has raged around the world this year, infecting nearly 380 000 people and wiping out the international sporting calendar. Though 2021 looks crowded, as the sports world makes up for this year’s cancellations, World Athletics said it was willing to move its world championships, scheduled for August 6 to 15, 2021, in Oregon, to accommodate the Olympics.