Inside the Games

Tokyo2020 Budget Chopped Down to USD12.9 Billion: A Far Cry from the USD30 Billion Estimate of 2016

Governor Yuriko Koike
Governor Yuriko Koike

Before Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike came on the scene, the projected overruns for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic budget was expected to take the overall budget to USD30 billion.

Soon after Governor took office, she stated she was determined to cut that budget down to size, vowing not to strap Tokyo taxpayers with any “white elephants”. In partnership with the International Olympic Committee, which feared that ballooning costs would further discourage cities from bidding for Olympics in the future, Koike began asking a lot of questions about the budget.

The IOC then encouraged that a four-party group be created to drive the budget down. For the past year, members of the IOC, Tokyo 2020, Governor Koike and representations from the Japanese national government have been working to ensure a budget of USD15 billion or less. On May 31, 2017, Tokyo2020 organizers that the budget has been reduced to USD12.9 billion, according to Around the Rings.

In comparison to another mature city, the 2012 London Olympics ended up costing USD19 billion.

One of the major hurdles of finalizing the budget was determining who would fund the construction of temporary facilities in venues outside Tokyo, where events like baseball and soccer would be played, for example. In the recently agreed-upon budget, local governments in seven prefectures (Hokkaido, Miyagi, Fukushima, Saitama, Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka) and four cities (Sapporo, Saitama, Chiba and Yokohama) will pay only for costs related to “medical services and security transportation to and from venues, but that Tokyo will cover costs for temporary facilities for venues outside of the Japanese capital”, according to Inside the Games.

Another potentially very good decision by the four-party task force, according to this Tokyo 2020 document, was to create a committee made up members of the four parties to monitor costs. This Management Committee for Collaborative Projects will look to optimize resources and further reduce costs with reviews held on a regular basis.

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Drug Testing at the 2016 Rio Olympics a Shambles

drug-testing

2016 was the year when the entire Russian track and field team was banned from the Olympics. The evidence was so strong that the IAAF took the bold step of enacting the ban, affirming the report by the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA accused the Russian government of a state-sponsored program to use drugs in the development of their athletes and then to cover up the drug use through illicit techniques to avoid positive drug tests.

So one would think that the Rio 2016 organizing committee and the IOC would be well prepared to ensure that officials were doing their very best to ensure a level playing field for all “clean” athletes. And yet, one could say that the state of drug testing in the run up to Rio and during the Rio Olympics was chaos.

According to this BBC article:

  • Of the 11,470 athletes, over 40% or 4,125 athletes had no record of any drug testing in 2016.
  • Of those 4,125 athletes, almost half of them were competing in so-called “higher-risk sports” (e.g.: track and field, swimming, weightlifting, cycling).

Again, those are pre-Rio Olympic numbers and a black mark on the IOC, sports governing bodies, as well as anti-doping agencies.

But during the Rio Olympics, the anti-doping processes were apparently a mess.

  • Again, there was little or no in-competition testing for athletes in “higher-risk sports”
  • Of the 11,300 athletes in Rio, only 4,800 were providing information of their whereabouts, a step required of athletes and necessary to allow drug testing officials, aka chaperones, to locate and request drug testing on demand
  • The above resulted in the failure to test about 50% of targeted athletes every day during the Olympics because athletes could not be located (Chaperones were forced to ask team officials where the athletes were, which likely allowed athletes to know in advance that a test was forthcoming)
  • Nearly 100 samples were mislabeled and therefore invalid
  • The team fell nearly 500 tests short of their minimal requirements

Nick Butler of Inside the Games had this interesting perspective:

Two key questions here concern to what extent these problems were avoidable from the IOC perspective and to what extent this fundamentally affected the efficiency of the anti-doping operation at Rio 2016. 

To some extent, there appears little the IOC and other sports officials could have changed the approach of the organisers. Brazil and chaotic preparation are just too closely entwined and, when the budget cuts and political disruption is considered, it is a miracle the Olympic and Paralympic Games happened at all.

Yet, on the other hand, the IOC had seven years to get this one right and were not exactly strapped for cash to provide more support.

Will Tokyo2020 get it right?

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