What’s Happening With This Year’s Olympic Games?

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: So, you heard about all of this headwind, right, all of these concerns. We have a year delay now in the Olympics. Given all of that, why is the IOC so determined to go forward with the Games?

BOB COSTAS, VETERAN SPORTSCASTER: Here’s what you have to understand, Bianna. All Olympic contracts are written in a very favorable fashion for the IOC. If there are cost overruns, as they’re almost always are for every host city, none of that falls on the IOC. Even pre-COVID, the cost overrun is close to double for Tokyo. It may be triple now. None of that falls on the IOC. So, if they go ahead, even if most of the international community, most of Japanese citizens, most of the health community, including the CDC, as you mentioned just today, thinks it’s a very bad idea, and even if, on the face of it, the average person says, we don’t want to cancel, but just postpone it until next year, when circumstances would be better, we hope and expect, we have some reason to expect, circumstances would be better, and not only in terms of the health circumstances, but people attending the Games, the organizing committee able to make up some of their investment. It would go back to the old situation which we used to have prior to the ’90s where both the Winter and summer Olympics were in the same year. They could do that once as a one-off. Postponing it seems to make great sense. But here’s the key. The IOC collects every penny from NBC, which is its primary source of revenue, international broadcasting, the bulk of which comes to the United States. If they put on the Olympics, even if those Olympics are not as valuable to NBC as the network had reason to anticipate — they couldn’t have anticipated these circumstances, and no one in the stands, and the weirdness of it, and a lot of the glory and all the good feeling that surrounds it being reduced. If they take place, and if the Games are televised, as they will be, every penny goes into the IOC’s coffers. All the risk is on somebody else, both financially and from a health standpoint. It’s all on someone else, not the IOC.

GOLODRYGA: Yes, I’m so glad you made that point, because, legally, if Japan just decided today we’re going to cancel the Games, then it does appear that the IOC would likely win a court suit as well, not to mention the P.R. nightmare that it would be for Japan.