World Athletics president Sebastian Coe on Sunday said that the decision to postpone this year’s Tokyo Olympics because of the coronavirus has saved athletes from “mental turmoil”.
Former Olympic champion Coe supported the move to push and said competitors would have been placed in an impossible position if the event had been left to start on July 24 as originally scheduled.
They would have been tempted to continue training despite large parts of the world being in lockdown.
“We didn’t want to have athletes in a position where they were countering govt advice, maybe even breaking law,” Coe told TalkSport.
“And of course in the back of their minds was always that concern, it wasn’t just their own training programme, but that they ran the risk of effectively infecting themselves, their families, and we just wanted to take them out of that mental turmoil as quickly as we possibly could.
“We’re no different from everyone else out there but I think we just concluded that sport, on this occasion, had to take a back seat.”