The Olympic postponement, while the right decision, has obviously wreaked havoc on the international sporting calendar. World Championships have been moved from 2021 to 2022 and athletes have to rethink their plans--not just about this year and whether it's worth even competing at all--but for the whole cycle. And it's not just individual athletes. In some cases, it's entire national teams.
A lot of veteran athletes decide to stick around for "one more Olympics" before retiring. For many, Tokyo was going to be their last hurrah. Now they're forced to make a choice. Either give it one more year and still hang it up after Tokyo or still call it a career after 2020 and miss out on that last Olympics. Most will choose the former. The fact that nobody's able to compete at all this year certainly makes that decision easier. But I know there's at least one who opted for the latter, not wanting to subject their body to another year of training, etc.
You also have cases like Justin Gatlin's. The next Track & Field World Championships are in Eugene, Oregon. It's the first time they'll ever be held in the United States. Gatlin planned on retiring after finally getting to compete in Worlds on home soil. He now won't get that opportunity. He's still retiring after the 2021 season. Only his farewell will be in Tokyo. Not Eugene.
Then there's the college athletes who took the year off. Some deferred their enrollment, while some decided to use their redshirt season in order to focus solely on qualifying for the Olympic team. That sometimes includes withdrawing from school for a year in order to train. What are they going to do?
In many ways, that's an even tougher decision than the one faced by retiring athletes. Would their school be willing to let them defer enrollment another year? Or, for the ones who chose to redshirt, if they do it again, they'll lose a year of eligibility (although, in track, they'll only lose a year of indoor since there was no outdoor season).
Granted, if you're an Olympic-caliber athlete, that's not as big of a concern. Many of them turn professional without competing their eligibility anyway. But for freshmen and sophomores, it's still a worthwhile question. Is it worth missing ANOTHER year? Or, do you change your plan entirely and compete collegiately in 2020-21? And if they do take that option, how much does it impact the ultimate goal, which is still Tokyo?
That's a problem that the U.S. women's basketball team also faces. Last WNBA season, most of the players announced that they weren't going to play overseas in the offseason and instead were going to spend the winter and spring together, as the National Team, playing exhibition games against top college programs. They lost to Oregon and beat UConn. Now that plan, too, went up in flames.
Is another national tour by the U.S. women's basketball team in the works for 2020-21? Will that even be possible with uncertain travel conditions? Or do they risk going back overseas (which could be even more difficult)? After all, they only said they were taking 2019-20 off from their foreign teams. They said nothing about 2020-21. Likewise, does the WNBA really want to go two seasons without its best players, which will now include the Liberty's Sabrina Ionescu?
Likewise, a lot of athletes plan their competition schedules years in advance. They build around major events--obviously--but also make a lot of decisions about their personal lives around the Olympic cycle. Some might want to take it easy or try another event in the "off" year that now doesn't exist. Some might take a year off entirely to focus on school or a job. Others might've wanted to get married or have a baby or some other life milestone.
No one is saying they can't still do that. It just becomes a lot more difficult when you suddenly go from planning on having the typical four years between Olympics to now having only three. They're professionals. They'll figure it out. But it's definitely an adjustment that wasn't planned.
Of course, there's no guarantee that the Tokyo Olympics will even take place in 2021. That makes these decisions even more difficult. All that work, all that training, all that planning went into an Olympics that everyone was expecting to be this summer. What happens if the same thing happens again? You refocus your efforts for an event 12 months later than planned. Then it's all gone, only this time permanently? The only good thing about it is it'll be one year closer to Paris. But those will also be two years in the prime of their careers that they're never getting back.
Obviously, this is all new territory for everyone. When all of these plans were made, the Tokyo Olympics were still scheduled for this July. Even when the calendar turned to 2020, no one could've anticipated that all hell would break loose across the world and the Olympics would be delayed a year. And, like everybody else, they're having to adjust on the fly.
Even as they make these new plans, though, there's still plenty of uncertainty. That was one of the main issues earlier this year. The IOC hadn't yet postponed the Games, so the athletes were left in limbo. How were they supposed to train when everywhere was closed? And, if it wasn't going to be possible to hold the Olympics this year as planned, what were they training for anyway?
Unfortunately, those questions still can't be answered. But at least they can plan for the 2021-24 Olympic cycle. Or, I should say, the 2022-24 Olympic cycle. We'll have to wait until Paris to see how much of a difference it'll make having three years between Games instead of four.
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