Tokyo’s Olympic Stadium will sit empty Friday — the day thousands were supposed to descend on the venue for the 2020 Summer Games — marking the first time since World War II that the sporting event will not begin as scheduled.
Instead of hosting a big, flashy opening ceremony, the stadium was the site of a small event Wednesday to mark the one-year countdown until the new start of the rescheduled Games — July 23, 2021.
Before this year, the Olympics have been canceled three times in the modern era, once during World War I in 1916 and twice during World War II, in 1940 and 1944.
Also, this isn’t the first time Japan has had to cancel as host city. The country was supposed to host the 1940 Summer and Winter Olympics — back when the two were held in the same years — but gave up its rights to do so when it declared war on China in 1937. Helsinki, Finland, was chosen as the new host city, but that event also fell through with Hitler’s 1939 invasion of Poland.
The International Olympic Committee postponed this year’s Games in March, when COVID-19 began piling up in China and Italy. The pandemic would soon envelop much of Europe before making the United States and South America the new epicenters of the disease.
To date, there have been more than 15.5 million coronavirus cases worldwide and 633,600 deaths, according to updated figures Friday from researchers at Johns Hopkins University in the United States. Japan is way down the list for total cases, 56th, with 28,500 and 992 deaths. By comparison, the United States leads all nations with 4.04 million cases and 144,300 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins data.
