The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said on Tuesday that the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games have been postponed until next year (2021) due to the spread of coronavirus worldwide.
The event, set to start on 24 July, will now take place in the summer of 2021".
"I proposed to postpone for a year and [IOC] president Thomas Bach responded with 100% agreement," Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, according to BBC.
The title of the event will still Tokyo 2020 despite taking place in 2021.
In a joint statement, the organizers of Tokyo 2020 and the IOC said: "The unprecedented and unpredictable spread of the outbreak has seen the situation in the rest of the world deteriorating."
On Monday, March 23, the director-general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said that the COVID-19 pandemic is 'accelerating'.
"There are more than 375,000 cases now recorded worldwide and in nearly every country, and their number is growing by the hour," Ghebreyesus said.
"In the present circumstances and based on the information provided by the WHO today (Tuesday), the IOC president and the prime minister of Japan have concluded that the Games of the XXXII Olympiad in Tokyo must be rescheduled to a date beyond 2020 but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic Games and the international community," the statement concluded.
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