Abe said that he and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had no choice but to postpone the Olympic Games and the Paralympic Games, in the wake of the worldwide struggles with the coronavirus COVID-19. The World Health Organization has declared it a pandemic. Confirmed cases around the world number in the hundreds of thousands, and deaths related to the virus have soared in recent weeks.

More than 6,000 athletes, comprising about 57 percent of the available slots, had already qualified for the Olympics, and other qualification events had been scheduled for the next few months. It is not yet clear whether all of those who already qualified will automatically be able to compete in 2021 (assuming that the pandemic has subsided by then). The IOC will be working with individual sporting federations on that and many other matters in the coming months.

The calls from individual athletes had come for several weeks. Escalating the pressure were Australia and Canada, the Olympic bodies of which said that they would not send their athletes to the Tokyo Games. The U.S. Olympic Committee encouraged a postponed but stopped short of saying that its athletes wouldn't attend.

A similar situation occurred in 2016, in the wake of an outbreak of the Zika virus. Brazil, the host country for those Olympic Games, was one of the countries considered for an outbreak of the mosquito-borne virus, and some individual athletes did refuse to participate. Even more recently, the 2018 Winter Olympics went ahead in the shadow of an outbreak of norovirus, which afflicted numerous security guards in the Olympic Village.

Organizers reported having sold more than 5 million of the available 7.8 million tickets. People who have already bought tickets would likely be offered refunds, officials said; another option was to reassign those tickets to the following year's Games.

The Olympic Torch relay was to begin this week. The Flame has been lit but will stay in Fukushima. A large crowd in Sendai had welcomed the arrival of the Flame, which was lit in Olympia, Greece, according to longstanding tradition, on March 12 and then transported to the host country, Japan.

Tokyo officials also said that renaming the Games was unlikely, given that much of the material, including the thousands of medals (made from recycled consumer electronics), had already been produced.

The International Olympic Committee has canceled the Olympics only three times–1916, 1940, and 1944–and all were because of world wars. Tokyo had been awarded the 1940 Games, which were canceled; the IOC awarded hosting rights instead to Helsinki, which was the host country in 1952. Tokyo was the host country for the 1964 Olympic Games.

Major boycotts affected two Olympic Games, those of Moscow in 1980 and 1984 in Los Angeles. IOC President Thomas Bach was an athlete who had qualified for the 1980 Games.