The Tokyo Olympics, which were postponed due to the new coronavirus pandemic, will begin July 23 next year.
While officials considered other dates, including a spring Games, the global sports schedule made it highly unlikely the Olympics would be held anytime but the summer.
In the spring, the Games would overlap with the seasons of popular sports overseas, such as the National Basketball Association in the U.S. and soccer leagues in Europe.
The U.S. media raised the possibility of NBA players not coming to a spring Olympics, but top players could participate if the Games were held in the summer after their season ends.
If the world's attention was divided among other competitions or if star players were unable to participate, it would hurt the value of the Olympic brand in the eyes of The Olympic Partners (TOP), which is the highest level of Olympic sponsorship. Being a TOP sponsor costs billions of yen per year and allows companies to use the Olympic logo and develop related products.
The situation would be the same in the autumn as the National Football League and other popular sports draw Americans' attention.
U.S. broadcasting company NBC paid 4.38 billion dollars (about 473 billion yen) for the broadcast rights for a total of four Games, covering the Winter and Summer Olympics from 2014 to 2020.
While an NBC official had said March 23 that the company was prepared to accept any decision, a source said that summer is the best time for NBC.
Another Olympic source said that at a meeting between the International Olympic Committee and the International Sports Federations (IFs) on March 26, one of the attendees said that because it might take a long time for the coronavirus pandemic to end, maybe holding the Olympics around September 2021 would be better. The source said that IOC President Thomas Bach said nothing, completely ignoring the comment.
In 2013 through 2016 the IOC took in revenue of 5.7 billion dollars (about 616 billion yen), 90 percent of which was distributed to IFs and others. About 70 percent of this revenue came from the selling of broadcast rights.
The source said that at the meeting, nobody again mentioned holding the Games in autumn.
An executive of a sports organization said that it's a matter of life and death for small IFs, which can take having the Olympics postponed, but cannot have the revenue distribution halted.
Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College in Massachusetts who is knowledgeable about the business of sports, said that everything is connected to commercial considerations. Postponing is not easy or simple, but an exactly one-year delay was the best way and the only solution, he noted.
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