One Year To Go

In 2020 will take place another edition of the Olympic Games, this time in Tokyo, Japan. This has been known, it was announced in Buenos Aires six years ago. Hosting the Olympic Games is a pretty big deal for any country, I don't think there's one country to be ready for such an event without building stadiums and apartment buildings to host the athletes and officials.

The Japan delegation marches around the track at Tokyo's National Stadium during the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games on Oct. 10, 1964

When I saw Japan being awarded the right to host the games, I thought things would go smoothly as Japan seems to be a fair country with strict rules. Japan is a veteran already, this is going to be the second time for them. The first time was in 1964.

I had a post a while back about Japan making the medals out of refurbished, reused materials collected from the population, which seemed an excellent idea. I think it's a great way to collect reusable materials and give the population the satisfaction of knowing they have contributed.

Today I saw an article published by Reuters, according to which things are not going so well.

The National Stadium is almost complete, they say they are on schedule. 3.22 million tickets were already sold during the first domestic sales phase last month. Over 200,000 people applied to be volunteers.

However, things are not going great. The latest budget released in December 2018 says the total cost of the Games was at $12.6 billion. This is just a number but compared to the original budget of $7 billion gives us an idea about how they have underestimated the costs.

Earlier this year, Tsunekazu Takeda resigned as president of the Japanese Olympic Committee following allegations of suspected corruption related to the 2020 bid.
In 2015, organizers had to scrap the original logo over accusations of plagiarism and the original design for the centerpiece National Stadium was ditched because it was deemed too expensive. source

As I said in the title of the post, there's still one year to go and plenty of time for the organizers to make things right and finish everything in time so no one has to suffer. I know for a fact that in Rio, at the last edition of the Olympic Games accommodation wasn't what it should have been. Let's hope Tokyo will have better conditions to offer. This is an important event, people want to see something exceptional each time and athletes need the best condition they can have in order to give the best performance.

If you want to read some interesting and also funny facts about the 1964's Olympic Games hosted by Tokyo, I'd recommend you red the article written by Robert Whiting -> Opening Ceremony ushered in new era for Japan