ATHENS, Ga. — “My immediate reaction was disappointment, but I know why they had to do it,” said Olympic hopeful Garrett Scantling.
It is official as of Tuesday morning, the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games have been postponed until 2021. This is the first time in the history of the event that the games have been postponed due to something other than a World War.
"I just felt like once it hit the United States, it was going to be a wake-up call for everybody and really the decision was inevitable," he said.
Former Georgia Bulldog Garrett Scantling had exploded back on to the decathlon scene after taking a 3-year hiatus from the sport. He switched to football and was with both the Falcons and Jaguars for short stints before going back to the sport he always felt most connected to.
“That’s kind of why I’m salty about the whole thing -- because I put so much work coming back into it," he said. "It’s going to happen eventually, so I just need to make sure I get with my coach and we have the right timeline laid out. We need to make sure I’m training at the right time so I can peak at the right time for Olympic trials, whenever they happen.”
He recently snagged the world number two ranking for the heptathlon and now he has to wait for the different qualifying events to be rescheduled.
“I actually haven’t heard anything about what they’re going to do with the qualifying process for next year," Scantling said. "We had a decathlon scheduled here in Athens for the first week of April and that was my chance to get my Olympic qualifier back, because I hadn’t done a decathlon in three years.”
For now, the athletes are just finding solace in the fact that the games will happen eventually even though there is no date set just yet.
“This is the Olympics. Obstacles are going to present themselves in every which way," he said. "It’s one of the hardest things you can do as an athlete so it’s going to take a lot to get there.”
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