Tokyo: Tokyo’s postponed Olympics will go ahead next year regardless of the Coronavirus pandemic, International Olympic Committee (IOC) Vice-President John Coates told a news agency on Monday, saying they would be the “Games that conquered COVID.”

The Olympics have never been cancelled outside of the world wars and Coates, speaking in a phone interview, was adamant that the Tokyo Games will start on their revised date. 

“It will take place with or without COVID. The Games will start on July 23 next year,” said Coates, who heads the IOC’s Coordination Commission for the Tokyo Games.

“The Games were going to be, their theme, the Reconstruction Games after the devastation of the tsunami,” he added, referring to a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan in 2011. “Now very much these will be the Games that conquered COVID, the light at the end of the tunnel.”

In an historic decision, the 2020 Olympics were postponed because of the global march of the pandemic and they are now set to open on July 23, 2021.

But Japan’s borders are still largely closed to foreign visitors and a vaccine is months or even years away, feeding speculation about whether the Games are feasible at all. Japanese officials have made clear they would not delay the Games a second time beyond 2021.