More than 11,000 athletes have prepared for the Olympic Games in Tokyo from July 24th to August 9th, 2020. Nobody can work out what your personal balance sheet looks like for this postponement of a lifelong dream. What is clear, however, is the intermediate invoice from the organizers.
Before the relocation, the 2020 Games were estimated to cost $ 13 billion. The postponement of the Olympic Games in Tokyo to summer 2021 could now cause additional costs of the equivalent of 1.9 billion dollars. This is currently reported by the Japanese news agency Kyodo, citing several sources.
According to an earlier study by Oxford University, the Tokyo Games would have become the most expensive in the history of the Summer Games. “Taking part is more important than winning” would no longer have been the Olympic slogan, at least for the accounting department this year.
The International Olympic Committee IOC already earned around 5.3 billion euros at the 2016 Games in Rio. That would have been significantly more now. The largest share should have come from the media partners, especially from the big TV networks. Plus the premium sponsors, who usually let their advertising cost several hundred million during the games.
Apart from the stadiums, Tokyo was also expected to generate billions in revenue, on the one hand directly from the hundreds of thousands of Olympic tourists and on the other hand indirectly from the investments that paid off. How this budget can be saved into 2021 will still be a lot to haggle.
The IOC has taken out insurance against the cancellation of the games. How much money and to what extent the insurance will take effect in the event of the postponement is still open. For the 2016 Summer Games in Rio, in the run-up to which the Zika virus was looming, the “Insurance premium for Games cancellation” cost around 13.3 million euros.
But at least: With the first calculations in spring 2020, the financial consequences for the Japanese organizers seemed even more dramatic: At that time, local experts calculated costs of up to 5.7 billion euros because of the postponement. This sum was named by the IOC President Thomas Bach At that time, however, with the restriction that it was still too early for a binding calculation.
With regard to the newly available interim bill, Bach said that the IOC would meet its financial obligations towards host Tokyo. At the same time, cuts cannot be ruled out. Everything has to be checked.
As research by the Klein Report has shown, the IOC has so far spoken of having reserves of around one billion Swiss francs.
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