UGA Sports: Olympics Postponement ‘Absolutely The Right Thing’

By John Frierson
Staff Writer

The inevitable happened Tuesday when the International Olympic Committee announced that the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, set to begin in late July, were being postponed to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The news, which most everyone saw coming in recent days, affects elite athletes around the world, including many current and former Georgia Bulldogs.

Jack Bauerle, Georgia’s Tom Cousins swimming and diving head coach, said the postponement was “heartbreaking,” but at the same time it was “absolutely the right thing to do.” The disappointment felt by young and healthy athletes, he said, and the problems and challenges the postponement creates, pale in comparison to what’s happening around the world.

“This is the Olympics and its fixable,” Bauerle said Monday after word spread that a postponement announcement was coming, “but for so many others, this is real life and what’s happening is catastrophic.”

Bauerle isn’t able to work with any of his current swimmers since the NCAA suspended all athletic activities, but he has a group of 12 postgrads, professionals, some of them among the very best in the world, that he’s been working with every day, safely, at a pool in Atlanta.

“We were primed and ready and, gosh, it’s a heartbreaking thing, for coaches and athletes alike,” Bauerle said. “It’s our Super Bowl but we only have it every four years.”

By the time the opening ceremonies happen in 2021, it will have been roughly five years since the Rio Olympics in 2016. In those Games, Georgia had 27 former or current (at the time) student-athletes competing, with several of them earning medals, from Shaunae Miller-Uibo winning the gold in the women’s track and field 400 meters to multiple swimmers earning golds in relay events.

Four years ago, former Georgia swimmer Chase Kalisz earned a silver medal in the 400-meter individual medley in Rio, touching the wall .7 seconds behind gold medalist Kosuke Hagino of Japan. Ever since, Kalisz has spent a lot of time thinking about that race and working to make sure the ending is different next time.

“Obviously, losing gold by the margin that I did at the Olympics, it still hurts,” Kalisz told me in 2017. “I think about it multiple times a day. That last 10 meters of the race will replay in my head until I finally have the chance to kind of get redemption there,”

That redemption will have to wait, though Kalisz has remained among the very best individual medley swimmers in the world since the last Olympics. He won gold in the 200 and 400 I.M. at the 2017 World Championships, as well as the 2018 Pan Pacific Championships.

An injury married his 2019 season, but he was coming back strong in 2020, eager to get another shot at an Olympic gold medal. He said Tuesday that he’s perfectly fine with having to wait another year, both because it was “the best thing to do” given the pandemic and because it gives him more time to be at his best when the Games do take place.

“I don’t really think I’m going to see any negative effects from it,” he said of the postponement. “I was injured the prior year so this year was really important for me, to get back in the best shape I could as fast as possible. Now I’ve got 16 more months to take that to a whole other level.

“Yeah, I thought we (the former Georgia swimmers that still train with Bauerle) were all ready to go, I thought that I was probably going to have one of my best years I’ve ever had, but this just gives us more time to train and prepare.”

Also looking on the positive side of things following the news that the Olympics would be postponed was Georgia track and field coach Petros Kyprianou, who like Bauerle coaches multiple Olympic-caliber current and former Bulldogs. Kyprianou was also set to be the track and field head coach of the Estonian Olympic team, which would likely have had at least two Georgia decathletes on it in former Bulldog Maicel Uibo and current student-athlete Johannes Erm. Both would have been in the hunt for a medal, too.

“I think the way the world is right now, there was only one decision (the I.O.C.) could make,” Kyprianou said.

Part of that is because so many Olympic hopefuls all over the world were unable to train properly. With tracks and pools and so many other facilities shut down for safety reasons, the athletes couldn’t train for the Olympic Trials — the U.S. swimming and track and field trials were scheduled to take place in June — or the Games themselves.

“I think they (the I.O.C.) were trying hard to somehow make it work, but it can’t. If people cannot train, there’s no way to make it work,” Kyprianou said.

If the world can get this virus under control and begin to recover both in terms of health and economically, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics taking place in the summer of 2021 could be perfect timing. It will give a worldwide audience something to watch and celebrate together.

“Everyone is going to bring back that Olympic passion as we get closer to it and the world starts to heal,” Kalisz said.

Until then, athletes and coaches will have to hit the reset button on their “Olympic Year” training plans and hope for the best moving forward. In a way, that’s what we’re all doing during these unprecedented times.

“The hardest thing for everyone, all of us, not just the Olympic athletes and us coaches, is we just don’t know what’s coming down the road next,” Bauerle said. “Every two days, three days, something changes rather dramatically, so we just have to hold on to our seats and adjust the best we can.”

John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men’s Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files. He’s also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.