Olympics 2020: What and Why

During the two World Wars, the scheduled Summer Olympic Games of the leap years were cancelled, but not of 2020 which has been postponed to the present year and yet continues to be named as Tokyo 2020. Have you ever wondered why? The Indian Premier League could not be completed due to the Covid infection of some of the team members and also of some team officials but the BCCI has most fervently left no stone unturned to see to its culmination even if has to be conducted on a foreign land.

One needn’t go far to understand the reason for such endeavours. The real interest lies neither so much in the interest of sports’ lovers nor the welfare of the sportspersons but in the financial interest of the organisers. One doubt, however, may continue to haunt the more eager to know individuals is that a country like Japan which is so dedicated to accuracy and precision, why should it continue to name the Summer Olympics as Tokyo 2020 and not Tokyo 2021? The answer once again is financial. So the Tokyo 2020 Games that were set to start on Friday, 24 July 2020, and end on Sunday, 08 August 2020, would now have every event postponed by 364 days so that even the days of the week remain the same for every event, as planned earlier.

My younger daughter, who had been on a trip to Japan in 2020, months before the initial scheduled start of the Summer Olympics, knew that one of the best mementoes to get for her father would be a souvenir of the Olympic Games. So among the few things that I got from her were two writing pens with ‘Tokyo 2020’ embossed on them. Clearly, the marketing products related to the Olympic Games had permeated into the market several months before the scheduled start of the Olympic Games and the business houses would incur huge losses if the Summer Olympics were to be named as ‘Tokyo 2021’, something that the Olympic Committee could ill afford to draw the wrath of its sponsors.

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