Washington (AFP)

Donald Trump threw a stone in the pond Thursday by suggesting to postpone by one year the Olympic Games planned this summer in Japan, because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Faced with the wave of cancellations and postponements in the world of sport, basketball and American hockey championships, Italian football, tennis, the question of maintaining the Olympic Games is on everyone's lips.

Thanks to the rays of a radiant sun passing through a parabolic mirror, the Olympic flame was lit on Thursday on the site of the first Games in Olympia giving the symbolic start of this sporting event ... but without audience.

The same morning, Greece deplored its first death from the coronavirus.

For several weeks, the hypothesis of a cancellation of the Olympic Games scheduled in Japan from July 24 to August 9, followed in late August-early September of the Paralympic Games comes up regularly on the table.

"Unthinkable", has already decided the governor of Tokyo Yuriko Koike.

Since the start of the modern Olympic Games, neither boycotts (in 1980 in Moscow and 1984 in Los Angeles), nor the SARS virus (in 2003) or zika (before the Olympic Games in Rio 2016) have got the better of the Games, tradition unchanging organized every 4 years.

Only the world wars led to the cancellation of the Olympic Games planned in 1916 in Berlin or in 1940 in Sapporo (winter) and Tokyo (summer), and 1944 in Cortina d'Ampezzo (winter) and London (summer).

Donald Trump - who has no international sporting responsibility - wanted to give his opinion on the matter.

"Maybe, and it's just my idea, maybe delay them by a year, if that's possible," proposed the president from the White House, just hours after taking the world by surprise. closing the United States to a large part of Europe.

- Gather "in peace" -

"It's a shame ... because they really built magnificent buildings", "but I prefer that to empty stadiums everywhere," insisted the American president.

Organizing the Games behind closed doors, for which more than 11,000 athletes were expected and 7.8 million tickets were to be sold, seems difficult to envisage.

But the effects of a cancellation could be felt even more heavily on the Japanese economy.

Consumption has already been in crisis for months in the country. And with the explosion of the new coronavirus pandemic this year, Japan finds itself deprived of tourists from South Korea and mainland China, who alone accounted for almost half of the 31.9 million foreign visitors to the country. in 2019.

The Japanese Ministry of Tourism had counted on 600,000 foreign spectators for the Tokyo Games.

"They really did a great job. The facilities are incredible," said Donald Trump.

As if to dispel any doubt, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) assured AFP that with the lighting of the Olympic laziness, its "total commitment" to the success of the Games was confirmed.

Japanese organizers repeat that the Games will be organized as planned and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which will have the final say, continues to assert that no discussion on a possible cancellation has been initiated and that there are adhere to WHO recommendations.

And for the committee to insist on its objective: to bring the world together "in peace" ... and in good health.

© 2020 AFP