The Tokyo Games, set to feature 11,000 athletes from more than 200 countries, had been scheduled to start July 24 but were postponed to 2021 last week, with organizers now sharing the new dates.
The Summer Olympics in Tokyo have new dates for 2021 after organizers postponed the international sporting event last week amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The International Olympic Committee last week took the unprecedented step of pushing back the world's biggest sporting event that has been a fixture on the sporting calendar for more than a century.
The Tokyo Games, set to feature 11,000 athletes from more than 200 countries at a reported cost of $28 billion, had been scheduled to start July 24. When unveiling the delay, organizers said that new dates were yet to be determined.
Those dates have now been set as July 23 to Aug. 8, 2021.
"With this announcement, I am confident that, working together with the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the Japanese Government and all our stakeholders, we can master this unprecedented challenge," said IOC president Thomas Bach in a statement. "Humankind currently finds itself in a dark tunnel. These Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 can be a light at the end of this tunnel."
The Summer Games will still be called the 2020 Olympics — a symbolic gesture that the IOC said last week would allow the event to "stand as a beacon of hope."
Only World War I and World War II have forced the Olympics to be canceled in 1916, 1940 and 1944.
