The Tokyo Olympics Officially Have A New Start Date

The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games will take place exactly one year after the original date. The International Olympic Committee has announced that the Opening Ceremonies will now take place on July 23, 2021.

Last week, the International Olympic Committee announced that they had no choice but to postpone the 2020 Tokyo Olympics due to the ongoing threat of the coronavirus pandemic. When the postponement was originally announced, the IOC expressed that it could take as long as four weeks to make their future plans known, but after a conference call this week that included IOC President Thomas Bach, the new schedule was unanimously agreed upon.

“I am confident that, working together with the Tokyo 2020 Organising Committee, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the Japanese Government and all our stakeholders, we can master this unprecedented challenge. Humankind currently finds itself in a dark tunnel. These Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 can be a light at the end of this tunnel,” said Bach. 

One thing that has been clarified is that all athletes already qualified for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will maintain their position and be eligible to compete in the summer of 2021. 

What this means for surfing is that all those surfers that qualified for the Olympics via the WSL Championship Tour, the 2019 ISA World Surfing Games, and the 2019 PanAmerican Games will retain their provisional spots for next summer.

The ISA announced yesterday that it was indefinitely postponing its 2020 World Surfing Games, which was slated to decide the remaining Olympic spots. 

This may not be the glorious Olympic debut that the sport of surfing was hoping for, but the Games will go on … eventually.