The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee will start a gradual, closely monitored reopening of its two primary training sites for athletes on June 26, officials announced following two days of meetings by its board.
Only a small number of prospective Olympians will be permitted in the first phase of reopening following the shutdown to guard against the novel coronavirus at the centers in Colorado Springs and Lake Placid, N.Y., Sarah Hirshland, the USOPC’s chief executive, told reporters via conference call.
Hirshland said the USOPC has worked closely with its medical staff, as well as local and state officials, to develop protocols for a staged reopening but acknowledged that it was largely “uncharted territory.”
“We will start small and scale up so that we can provide a safe and productive environment for our athletes to train in those locations,” Hirshland said. “We understand the urgency athletes are feeling. They want to be training.”
The USOPC shuttered its Colorado Springs campus, where several hundred athletes live and train year-round, in mid-March. At the same time, the private gyms and college and university facilities where hundreds of other would-be Olympians train were also closed to guard against transmission of the highly contagious virus, forcing athletes to fashion their own, home-based training regimens without access to pools or essential equipment.
USOPC board chairman Susanne Lyons characterized the panel’s meetings as “lively and very important,” covering a range of topics including the financial implications and logistics of the reset for Tokyo 2020 and a reexamination of athletes’ latitude in using their platform to protest, advocate and express their views of matters of social justice and politics.
“None of us really knows if it will be safe to have competition with or without spectators next year,” Lyons said of the Tokyo Games, alluding to the lack of a vaccine, a global death toll that is approaching 450,000 and the prospect of a second wave of the pandemic.
The only course is to proceed as if the Games will open on July 23, 2021, as currently planned, which in many sports will mean adjusting the rules and procedures for selecting athletes after this summer’s qualifying events throughout sports have been canceled. Looking to 2021, in some sports such as gymnastics, a new group of age-eligible athletes will be in the mix and must be factored in a revamped selection process.
The financial implications of covid-19 have been profound at both the USOPC, which announced in May it was paring roughly 20 percent of its staff of around 500 through layoffs, furloughs and voluntary buyouts, and among the governing bodies of specific sports.
As Lyons noted, most sports’ governing bodies receive the bulk of their revenue from membership fees and events. “Most of those have come to a grinding halt,” she said.
Max Cobb, head of the USOPC’s National Governing Bodies Council, told The Washington Post this month that lost revenue could reach $100 million.
If the 2021 Tokyo Games cannot be held, Hirshland said the cuts would be significantly deeper.
Regarding athletes’ right to express themselves on issues of politics and human rights, Hirshland sent a letter earlier this month to U.S. athletes announcing the formation of “an athlete-led group to challenge the rules and systems in our own organization that create barriers to progress, including your right to protest.”
The implication was that the USOPC is willing to loosen its long-standing prohibitions and penalties against athletes who use their competitive platform to advocate, protest or express their views. Such a step would violate the Olympic Charter’s much debated Rule 50, which bars any “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda.”
Hirshland didn’t directly answer a question about whether U.S. athletes who kneel as a form of protest during U.S. competitions would be sanctioned, saying: “We have not done the work [yet] to make any modification to the rules or the policies.”
Hirshland said “about 30” U.S. athletes have come forward and volunteered to be part of that review process.
“We are 100 percent clear on our commitment to racial equality and equality overall,” Hirshland said, pledging that the organization will examine any policy that is a “barrier” to that.
