Talk swirling around the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in recent weeks, some people suggesting the coronavirus outbreak will force a postponement, might seem reasonable.
Professional sports leagues around the globe have suspended play. The NCAA canceled March Madness. Even President Trump has weighed in on the fate of the upcoming Summer Games.
"I would say maybe they postpone it for a year," he told reporters. "I like that better than having empty stadiums all over the place."
But the response from Olympic leaders and Japanese officials has been adamant, a repeated insistence on forging ahead. At a Saturday news conference, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said: "We will overcome the spread of the infection and host the Olympics without problem, as planned."
This reaction underscores two important points: The Games are still more than four months away and, just as significantly, shifting them to another date would be very tricky business.
"This is a global event, the staging of it is massive," said Mark Dyreson, a sports historian at Penn State. "It's a really tough decision because it has all sorts of ripple effects."
Since the modern Olympics began in 1896, they have remained largely immune to outside forces. They were not delayed in the waning days of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic that killed tens of millions or when the Seine River flooded shortly before the 1924 Paris Games. The Zika virus could not stop them in 2016.
