The Olympics have never been canceled outside of the world wars and Coates, speaking in a phone interview, was adamant that the Tokyo Games will start on their revised date.

“Tokyo Olympics games will take place with or without COVID pandemic. The Games will start on July 23 next year,” said Coates, who heads IOC’s Coordination Commission for the Tokyo Games.

“The Games were going to be, their theme, the Reconstruction Games after the devastation of the tsunami,” he said, referring to a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan in 2011.

“Now very much these will be the Games that conquered COVID, the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In a landmark decision, the 2020 Olympics were postponed because of the global march of the pandemic and they are now set to open on July 23, 2021.

But Japan’s borders are still largely closed to foreign visitors and a vaccine is months or even years away, feeding speculation about whether the Games are feasible at all.

Japanese officials have made clear they would not delay them a second time beyond 2021.

There are signs that public enthusiasm in Japan is waning after a recent poll found just one in four Japanese want them to go ahead next year, with most backing either another postponement or a cancelation.

‘Monumental task’

Coates said the Japanese government “haven’t dropped the baton at all” following the postponement, despite the “monumental task” of putting the event back a year.

“Before COVID, (IOC president) Thomas Bach said this is the best prepared Games we’ve ever seen, the venues were almost all finished, they are now finished, the village is amazing, all the transport arrangements, everything is fine,” he said.

“Now it’s been postponed by one year, that’s presented a monumental task in terms of re-securing all the venues… something like 43 hotels we had to get out of those contracts and re-negotiate for a year later.

“Sponsorships had to be extended a year, broadcast rights.”

With much of that work underway, or accomplished, a task force has been set up to look at the different scenarios in 2021 – from how border controls will affect the movement of athletes, to whether fans can pack venues and how to keep stadiums safe.

The group, comprising Japanese and IOC officials, met for the first time last week.

“Their job now is to look at all the different counter-measures that will be required for the Games to take place,” said Coates, the long-time president of the Australian Olympic Committee.

“Some countries will have it (COVID) under control, some won’t. We’ll have athletes therefore coming from places where it’s under control and some where it is not.

“There’s 206 teams… so there’s a massive task being undertaken on the Japanese side.”

Japan has already ploughed billions of dollars into the Olympics, with the delay only adding to the cost.

Coates said the IOC was doing its part, putting in “something like an extra $800 million to support the international federations, whose income isn’t happening this year, and national Olympic committees.”

Coates, an Australian, heads up the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) coordination commission for the Tokyo 2020 Games, which have been postponed until 2021 because of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Reuters reported.

“The good news is that all 42 Games venues … have been resecured. The competition schedule is the same,” the IOC vice president wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Friday, a day after the one-year countdown to the opening ceremony.

“But we must reduce the cost impact of postponement as well as simplify the Games to ensure they can be organized efficiently, safely and sustainably, in this new context.

“With one year to go, there is no clear picture of what shape the simplified Games will take. The situation with COVID-19, both domestically and internationally, is constantly changing.”

Coates wrote that putting in place counter-measures against COVID-19 would be no easy task but welcomed the top level commitment from the Japanese government, Tokyo regional government and Games organizing committee to get it done.

“The IOC and our Japanese partners … are doing everything in their power to ensure that not only will the Games go ahead next year, but the athletes remain first and foremost in all our planning,” he added.

“Yes, we want the athletes of the world to have their Olympic moment of competition, just as they would have dreamt. But critically, they must experience that moment in an environment where their health and safety … is assured.”

Coates is also president of the Australian Olympic Committee and added that the reaction of his country’s athletes to the postponement had been “inspirational”.

“All athletes with a Tokyo dream in their hearts have had to recalibrate their plans for a Games … they have demonstrated remarkable resilience in making that adjustment,” he wrote.

The countdown clock will be reset as soon as organizers and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decide when, exactly, a supposedly post-coronavirus world is ready for the second coming of the Tokyo Games.

Hours after Japan’s Prime Minister Abe Shinzo confirmed that the Games would be held “no later than next summer”, some Tokyoites were conflicted about their reaction.

Emi Hagino, a media consultant who was born and raised in the capital, said she had initially accepted the delay as inevitable, but then felt “massively let down”, as it would affect her business.

“My parents remember watching the 1964 Olympics here, so they have experienced it before, but for me it was going to be a magical once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to actually see the world’s biggest sporting event with my own eyes, with everyone’s focus on my city,” she said.

“I can wait for another year, but please, no longer.”

Koichi Teratani, who blogs about the city’s Kabukicho entertainment district – a popular destination among Chinese tourists – said the postponement was a second blow for local businesses still reeling from the financial costs inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Hotels are already struggling from cancellations, so the smaller ones that don’t have the means to weather the storm face even more uncertainty,” said Teratani, who had just started printing 40,000 copies of a bilingual guidebook to Kabukicho – an area packed with thousands of bars, restaurants, and clubs – hand out to visitors during the Olympics when the postponement was announced.

“We can hang on to them for another year, even though some of the information might be a bit out of date,” he said.

There was disappointment that the spectacle, more than six years in the planning, had been delayed, but relief, too, both that the speculation of recent weeks had ended and, crucially, that Abe and the IOC president, Thomas Bach, had agreed that cancellation was out of the question.

“I think the Japanese government and the IOC had no choice but to postpone because holding the Olympics without athletes from around the world would have run counter to the Olympic Charter,” said Akino Yoshihara, a Kyoto-based translator who had been looking forward to watching track and field events.

“It would have been unfair if some athletes had been denied the opportunity to compete because of the coronavirus situation in their countries.”

Yujiro Nakao, a Tokyo company employee, agreed that a delay was the only sensible response to the outbreak, but said he had “mixed feelings” about not being able to see athletes who had spent years preparing for the biggest moment of their careers.

The first postponement in the Olympics’ 124-year modern history is expected to create a financial headache for the myriad businesses with a financial stake in the Games.

The IOC and local organizers will have to renegotiate contracts with official broadcasters and sponsors and extend rent agreements on venues that, until Tuesday, were to have served their purpose by the time the Paralympics ended in early September.

The Nikkei business delay reported on Wednesday that the organizing committee estimates that the postponement will raise the total cost for the Games by 300 billion yen ($2.7 billion) due to additional labor and other costs. There is no guarantee, either, that the 80,000 volunteers who were due to descend on Tokyo this summer will be available next year.

“Obviously, the celebratory mood of the Olympics had already been fading due to the coronavirus,” an official from one of the Games’ sponsors told the newspaper.

“Perhaps it would not have been fully welcomed if the Games had gone on as scheduled. We just need to start afresh.”

The general mood was best summed up by the Japanese phrase shikata ga nai (it can’t be helped) – a catchall response to any situation, large or small, over which people believe they have no influence. Recent polls indicated that about 70 percent of Japanese people had resigned themselves to a postponement as soon as it became clear that the coronavirus was going to take months, possibly much longer, to bring under control.

Ami Takada, a recent high school graduate, was among those enjoying the spring sunshine in Tokyo on Wednesday who wondered if a one-year delay would be long enough, given the virus’s seemingly unstoppable onslaught.

“If they don’t hold the Olympics [in 2021], it will be the end for the Japanese economy,” she said.