Coronavirus delays change everything on the sporting landscape from Tokyo Olympics to Euro 2020

There are few people more hopeful than sports fans. Even now, in a time of quarantine, self-isolation and a global pandemic, sports fans live in hope. They hope that the current seasons will resume in the coming weeks and things will get back to normal, just as they hope that this disruption will be positive. None hope harder than England football fans. Supporters of the Three Lions are international football’s most hopeful. They still believe, as the song goes, and the spectre of winning the Fifa World Cup in 1966 looms large even for those who cannot remember it. This is all fuelled by the English press, of course, and they have been peddling their national brand of desperate optimism in the weeks since the Uefa European Championship was moved from this summer to next. England are now shoo-ins to win the Henri Delauney trophy at Wembley next summer, with the coronavirus pandemic essentially ensuring success. Liverpool skipper Henderson is proving priceless in repairing the club’s tattered image Spurs striker Harry Kane and Manchester United’s Marcus Rashford will be back from the injuries that had left their appearance this summer touch-and-go. The young prospects on the fringes of Gareth Southgate’s squad will be on the fringes no longer. Manchester City’s Phil Foden, Chelsea’s Callum Hudson-Odoi and Mason Mount, Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka and Manchester United’s Mason Greenwood will all be a year older, a year wiser and a year readier to conquer Europe. Congratulations England, ignoring the fact that this hope relies on those young players being able to play football between now and Euro 2021, while several other countries are set to benefit from players returning from injury – Italy’s Nicolo Zaniolo, Memphis Depay, of the Netherlands, Belgium’s Eden Hazard, and the French pair of Ousmane Dembele and Paul Pogba to name but five potential match-winners. That puts into perspective the utter lunacy of looking 12 months into the sporting future. We have no clue how this season will be resolved let alone where we will be a year from now, never mind what can happen if we do get football up and running. Hope is the English disease when it comes to sport. The Great Britain cycling team have put a positive spin on the Olympic Games being postponed for a year. It gives them a chance to bridge the gap on the teams who have pulled ahead of them, team manager Stephen Park said, while three-time Olympic champion cyclist Ed Clancy, who had planned to retire after Tokyo this summer, said he was “absolutely up” for next summer. Clancy will be 36 by then and not the only Olympian who might see their medal potential diminish as the months tick by. Tiger Woods and Serena Williams were expected to make Tokyo this summer and the two global sporting superstars were assumed to be gold hopes to boot. Woods will turn 45 before the end of the year and Williams 39. Time will not stop for their competitors either but it is kinder on those in their 20s and early 30s. Being aged out is one unforeseen effect of the Olympics moving 12 months. Record breaking US gymnast Simone Biles is only 23 but like Alexander the Great she has no more worlds left to conquer and is not committed to appearing at another Summer Games. “I haven’t decided not to do it, but I haven’t really decided to do it,” she told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month in her first interview since Tokyo was postponed. It goes the other way too. The organisers might insist that they are still the Tokyo 2020 Olympics but the move by 12 months changes everything – and it could come at more of a cost than printing new merchandise and letterheads. World Anti Doping Agency head Witold Banka has warned that hundreds of dope cheats will now be eligible because their bans will have lapsed by next summer – and those bans are in terms of time not events. Malaysian badminton legend Lee Chong Wei has said that the delay gives Japan’s Kento Momota an advantage in the men’s singles. Momota is recovering from a car accident in January and is yet to play but has added time to get back to his best. Lee also said that his long-time rival, China’s Lin Dan, who will turn 37 this year, may struggle. No word on Sun Yang appeal but Olympics delay raises hopes On the flip side, the extra 12 months gives South African sprinter Caster Semenya time to get her qualifying time for the 200 metres. World Athletics barred her and other athletes with DSD (differences of sexual development) from competing in distances between 400 and 1,600 metres but she can run the 200m and now has time to get her 23.49 PB down to the 22.80 qualifying time. That is if the Olympics go ahead in 2021 at all. Tokyo Games boss Toshiro Muto warned on Friday that there is no guarantee that the pandemic will be under control by then. “We sincerely hope that come next year mankind will manage to overcome the coronavirus crisis,” he said. As much as sports fans might hope, no one stops the clock on Father Time.