COVID-19 and Scenario Planning

On March 22, 2020, the International Olympic Committee announced that it was going to take a month to study the scenarios regarding the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games to determine if the Games would go on as planned, or be postponed or cancelled. Only two days later, long before that month had passed, they leaked the announcement of the postponement until the summer of 2021.

The broad outlines of what happened during those 48 hours are easy to guess – having weighed their options, the Committee was unable to see how the Games could continue as planned. There was, they must have seen, no credible scenario in which the athletes would be ready to compete, and the world’s travel industry could be ready to transport millions of fans.

They also must have realized that the huge uncertainties about the course of the pandemic meant that there was no way to know if by July, when the games had been scheduled to begin, the pandemic would have eased enough that travel on a mass scale would even be possible.