V 10 N. 20 "Hell, No. We Won't Go" Canada Takes the First Bold Step

This evening in The Guardian it was announced that Canada has stated that it shall not attend the Olympics.   Following our prediction last week,  expect a domino effect as nations begin spouting the same policy and eventually the games will go crash for this year.  Looks like the Aussies may be next.

Here is the beginning of the Guardian article.

Canada has become the first country to warn that it won’t send its athletes to the Tokyo Olympics unless they are postponed for a year, as pressure builds to delay the Games due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Canadian Olympic Committee said holding the Games as planned would threaten the health of its athletes, “their families and the broader Canadian community for athletes to continue training for these Games”.

“In fact, it runs counter to the public health advice which we urge all Canadians to follow,” it said in a statement, hours after the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, conceded for the first time that postponement was now a possibility if the Games could not be held in their “complete form”.

The committee added: “While we recognise the inherent complexities around a postponement, nothing is more important than the health and safety of our athletes and the world community.”

The Australian Olympic committee (AOC), meanwhile, has told its athletes to prepare to compete in the Olympics in the northern-hemisphere summer of 2021.

Sayonara but not goodbye. 


1.Good decision by Canada.  This is not akin to the US boycott in 1980 but instead is a first step toward more countries doing the same, sort of a domino theory of the Olympics.

2.Yes indeed

I see the first 3 Diamond League meets have been postponed so far...

3.One snow flake starts an avalanche.  How long will it take for us to join the slide?.  

But what if Tokyo just postpones til late Fall?

4.Late Fall it might snow.....


5.It would be interesting to look back to 1980 when President Carter took the US out of the Moscow Olympics and expected others to follow suit.  Not many did.  How did he manage this?  Did he pressure the USOC directly or did he have some special legislated power to say that we were staying home?

Then earlier the Africans decided to boycott in 1976 when a New Zealand rugby team toured South Africa.  Rugby was not even an Olympic sport.  I thing Ethiopia, then in our pocket, stayed in the games but the Kenyans and Tanzanians boycotted along with a lot of other African nations.  For that, Henry Rono never got a shot at an olympic medal.   I can't remember if Kenya boycotted in 1980.