Description

(18 Jul 2017) Uncertainty over the final budget for the 2020 Olympic Games will continue until 2019, the head of the Tokyo Organising Committee said on Tuesday."We will continue to explore more cost efficiencies," Tokyo 2020 CEO Toshiro Muto told the foreign media amid concerns regarding the higher-than-projected costs.The estimated cost of hosting the games has doubled to 1.4 trillion yen (12.6 billion US dollars) from the 730 billion yen (6.6 billion dollars) that was proposed when Tokyo won the bid in 2013.Tokyo has cut some costs by shifting to temporary facilities and pre-existing ones, including some outside Tokyo, instead of building new facilities. Muto said 60 percent of the venues are existing ones, and 40 percent are outside Japan's capital.He also stressed that management costs would be recouped through private sponsorship deals. The plan to keep costs down includes holding some baseball and softball games in Fukushima prefecture, the site of the nuclear plant meltdowns that followed the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.Muto noted that a major theme for Tokyo 2020 will be recovery from the devastating disaster of nearly a decade earlier.He said Tokyo was one of the most prepared cities in the world if a natural disaster were to take place before the event.You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/you... Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork

Tags

AP Archive 4106767 bd8d121910dc060ac409311efa0b85a5 Japan Olympics Tokyo Japan East Asia Sports Olympic games General news