"Be sure that the IOC is not going to send you into a pandemic situation," the IOC's most senior official tells athletes.
If you’re attached to the internet teat like most, certainly me, you’ll be aware of a super-flu like disease that may or may not have been created by the Communist Chinese government but that certainly originated from the Middle Kingdom.
Coronavirus. Twenty-six hundred dead, seventy-nine thousand infected.
And spreading. Just hit Europe etc.
You remember SARS?
The last scary pandemic?
Eight hundred dead, eighty-thousand infected.
Now, with surfing’s moment of Olympic glory only months away, a senior member of the IOC has said the whole thing might have to be cancelled because of Coronavirus.
From the AP wire,
Dick Pound, a former Canadian swimming champion who has been on the IOC since 1978, making him its longest-serving member, estimated there is a three-month window — perhaps a two-month one — to decide the fate of the Tokyo Olympics, meaning a decision could be put off until late May.
“In and around that time, I’d say folks are going to have to ask: ‘Is this under sufficient control that we can be confident about going to Tokyo or not?’” he said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press.
If the IOC decides the games cannot go forward as scheduled in Tokyo, “you’re probably looking at a cancellation,” he said.
Pound said the future of the Tokyo Games is largely out of the IOC’s hands and depends on the course the virus takes.
“If it gets to be something like the Spanish flu,” Pound said, referring to the deadly pandemic early in the 20th century that killed millions, “at that level of lethality, then everybody’s got to take their medicine.”
Pound told athletes, “Be sure that the IOC is not going to send you into a pandemic situation.”
A tragedy in so many ways, corpses littering the streets of Wuhan and precious little animals being destroyed in the millions, but…
Surfing’s Olympic debut?
Killed before it could be birthed?
And Tokyo’s second cancelled Olympics?
Oh, isn’t it ironic.
