July 16, 2020
（Reuters: Jul 15） Canadian lawyer and longtime IOC member Dick Pound believes the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics would be in jeopardy should the postponed Summer Games in Tokyo not be held next July.
If the postponed Tokyo Olympics do not go ahead next year due to COVID-19 then the 2022 Beijing Winter Games will likely also fall victim to the pandemic, said long-time International Olympic Committee member Dick Pound.
If there is no vaccine and countries are unable to contain the pandemic that continues to rage in different regions of the world, killing more than 580,000 people, then the IOC could once again be forced to postpone or cancel the Tokyo Olympics.
This would most likely trigger a knock-on effect taking out the Beijing Games as well, Pound said. The Beijing Winter Olympics are scheduled for Feb. 4-20, 2022, just six months after the Tokyo Summer Games, which are now set to be held from July 23 to Aug. 8, 2021 after being pushed back a year by the novel coronavirus outbreak.
"Taking the political side out of it for the moment, say there is a COVID problem in July and August next year in Tokyo, it is hard to imagine there is not going to be a knock-on effect in the same area five months later," Pound told Reuters in a phone interview.
The Beijing Olympics could be further complicated by a number of political showdowns, including an increasingly unstable and volatile situation in Hong Kong and an American election that could see U.S./China relations as one of the main issues.
U.S. President Donald Trump has labelled the pandemic the "China virus" and blamed the country for the outbreak that first emerged from the Chinese city of Wuhan.
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