Your sports calendar is officially clear. The Tokyo Olympics were postponed this week until 2021. So that's it: your spring and maybe your entire summer is free of sporting obligations, as far as we can tell. Looks like you'll have plenty of time to dig into the 17-minute song Bob Dylan dropped last night riffing on the Kennedy assassination and pretty much everything else! Speaking of things that are very long, it took the International Olympic Committee quite a while to conclude that a mass gathering of people from nearly every country on earth isn't a very good idea at the moment. But IOC President Thomas Bach said that he urgently realized -- on Sunday -- that this coronavirus thing was getting pretty big. And so it was. The delay has far-reaching implications. It's not just that it stinks to be deprived of a summer watching Simone Biles shock and amaze again. The delay also hurts amateur sports bodies that need the money. (This is a big problem for college sports, too, after the March Madness cash machine was turned off.) This crisis is a blow for many in the sports universe but, as Jason Gay writes, the athletes suffer the most. Which brings us to Kareem Maddox. He quit his nice job in podcasting to devote his life to winning a spot on Team USA's first Olympic team in 3x3 basketball, a new sport that was set to take Tokyo by storm. Kareem's chances had advanced so far that he was having imaginary conversations with LeBron James in his head. But now? Ben Cohen has the story of how one athlete's Olympic dreams have been punted into uncertainty. Meanwhile, we're still looking for sports to cover. And we found one -- on the edge of Siberia. It's a chess tournament with high stakes. The players are literally geniuses, but there is one move they can't quite master. They can't stop themselves from touching their face while playing chess. This new way to live is so hard to get the hang of. --Bruce Orwall, Global Sports Editor Reach me at [email protected] and Twitter: @BruceOrwall |