IOC and Tokyo Committee postpone 2020 Summer Olympics

The Olympic and Tokyo Committees have announced the postponement of the 2020 Summer Olympics. Yahoo Finance’s Dan Roberts joins the On The Move panel to discuss the details.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: You're watching Yahoo Finance Live. I'm Julie Hyman. We have been covering all of the developments in the markets, which are seeing an outsized rally today, as well as the latest on coronavirus.

We, perhaps at long last, got the news about the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics. For more on that, we're joined by Dan Roberts, who has been covering that and the other cancellations we've been seeing in sports. Dan, they took a little while to get to this decision. But they finally got there.

DAN ROBERTS: Yeah, exactly right, Julie. And I would highlight the fact that maybe a silver lining for all the people involved-- it's not a cancellation, right? It's a postponement. The official statement out from the IOC and from the Tokyo organizing committee specifies that it will now be held at a time beyond 2020, but not later than summer 2021. So I think you have to conclude that the likeliest scenario is it will end up being exactly a year later than it would have been. It was supposed to start July 24 this summer. Maybe it ends up being right around that time 2021.

But boy, there's a lot of spillover effects, right? I mean, I recently wrote way back, three weeks ago, when we weren't sure what would happen, about the many different small travel companies that you know we're hearing from customers demanding 100% refunds, even customers who hadn't paid for the insurance option, so contractually, weren't owed 100%. If they continue to demand it and threaten lawsuits, some of these small travel businesses are going to go out of business before they can actually get the Olympics a year later.

There's also an interesting outcome maybe for the Tokyo economy. I mean, Tokyo is really anticipating this, excited. And it also had big implications politically for Shinzo Abe, who was kind of hanging his hat on this big 2020 Olympics.

And interesting side note, by the way, even though it will end up being in 2021, if at all, the state [INAUDIBLE] notes that it will still be called the 2020 Summer Games, even if it's held in 2021. Kind of interesting there.

But you know, Japan is holding its reelections October 2021. So now, that ends up being directly, immediately after the Olympics, if the Olympics happen in Summer 2021. So what does that mean for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe?

And then, of course, what does it mean for athletes. You know, for athletes who've been training for this for years, it's not as simple as saying, now it's going to be in a year. You have an extra year to train. I mean, if you are someone who was just going to make the cut-- maybe you were 36, and this was going to be your last year you could do the Olympics-- well, can you still do it physically at 37? There are all kinds of implications.

But a silver lining-- at least as of now, it's postponed, not completely canceled.

JULIE HYMAN: All right, well, we'll count on you to keep us posted about any further developments on that front. Thank you so much, Dan Roberts.