The Australian Olympic Committee continues to tell athletes to prepare for the Tokyo Olympics to proceed in four months amid growing doubt caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The AOC says the International Olympic Committee has provided fresh assurances that the 2020 Games will start in July despite widespread concerns.

“We owe it to our Australian athletes to do everything we can to ensure they will participate with the best opportunity in those Games,” AOC chief executive Matt Carroll said, having been one of many bosses to order staff to work from home during the past week.

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But former Australia chef de mission and Olympic rowing champion Nick Green cast doubt on the Games, saying it would be “very difficult” to hold them as the world grapples with the global pandemic.

Green, who led Australia’s delegation to the 2012 London Olympics, said the widespread bans on mass gatherings by governments over the past two weeks had changed his mind about the chances of Tokyo going ahead in July.

“A couple of weeks ago, I was as confident as everyone else, saying the Olympics would go ahead, no problem,” Green told Fairfax media. “Only the world wars have stopped the Olympics from proceeding aside from a few boycotts here and there.

“I’m pretty robust about it but I don’t have the same robustness in my thinking now. I actually can’t see how the Games can go ahead, to be frank.”

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Australia’s incumbent chef de mission, Ian Chesterman, said that urgent adaptations to the qualification processes for each sport should be clearer by early April when international federations submit their revised systems to the IOC.

“There are a number of challenges all athletes are facing between now and then, but two stand out,” Chesterman said. “First is gaining qualification for the Games with so much disruption to world sport and travel, and second is ensuring they are able to attend the Games free of coronavirus.

“The situation regarding qualification is complex to say the least, with global travel restrictions among many measures that prevent qualifying events anywhere in the world from going ahead right now.”

“International Federations will seek to create a clear path to the Games for each sport. The AOC will certainly assist all our National Federations here in Australia as they respond to the specific decisions in their individual sports.”

Green, 52, was a member of Australia’s celebrated “Oarsome Foursome” that won back-to-back golds in the coxless four at Barcelona in 1992 and Atlanta four years later.

“My initial instinct was this will be managed and it will be business as usual pretty quickly,” he said of the virus, which has now infected over 212,000 people and caused 8,700 deaths in 164 nations.

“But now the information that’s being presented ... makes it clear it would be very, very difficult for an event like the Olympics to occur considering every other single event globally on mass gatherings of people have been either cancelled or suspended indefinitely.”

Global sport has been brought to a virtual standstill by the virus, with major tournaments including golf’s Masters, the French Open tennis and football’s European Championship postponed in recent days.

Green said the very nature of an Olympics, which herds thousands of athletes into high-security athletes’ villages for their accommodation and meals, would be a health risk.

“The way the Olympics has operated in the past is .... 10,500 athletes descend on the Olympic village and they usually go from bubble to bubble from a security point of view,” he said. “But in today’s environment that’s probably the worst thing ... having 10,500 athletes in one location at the one time.”