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The inevitable has become official: The 2020 Summer Olympics have been postponed.

The Summer Games in Toyko, Japan, became the latest major sporting event to feel the effect of the global coronavirus pandemic, as the International Olympic Committee on Tuesday announced the Games have been postponed until 2021.

The official joint statement from the IOC and the Toyko 2020 Organizing Committee cited a recent announcement from the World Health Organization indicating the spread of COVID-19 is accelerating, as there are now nearly 400,000 worldwide cases, and it appears things are only going to get worse before they finally start improving.

It’s still too early to say when the Olympics will be rescheduled for, but the statement Tuesday indicated the rescheduled event will be “beyond 2020 but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic Games and the international community.”

Thumbnail photo via Yukihito Taguchi/USA TODAY Sports Images

A little bragging here, but with a message: Bleacher Report Editor in Chief Joe Yanarella has been named Digital Editor of the Year by Adweek.

Adweek honored Yanarella, who became editor in 2009, for turning B/R from “a place where unpaid bloggers got an ego boost with a byline—and nothing else” to a place that “has ESPN and Sports Illustrated not only looking over their shoulders but in many cases trying to catch up with an editorial machine that’s laser-focused on social and mobile.”

From the article, by Christopher Heine:

 ”Journalism has been forced to keep up with sites like Bleacher Report,” says Jason Sullivan, evp and managing director at Publicis Seattle. “It has the urgency of Twitter, the ability to use localization to follow your favorite team and a constantly improving level of quality and legitimacy to keep fans tuned in during the sports world’s biggest moments.”

Not long ago, B/R was hardly on the radar of ad agencies or sports fans. Prior to Yanarella’s arrival, it was a place where unpaid bloggers got an ego boost with a byline—and nothing else; none of its contributors was paid. Yanarella recalls that his bosses “wanted to build Bleacher Report into one of the largest sports sites in the U.S. My response: with an entire volunteer-writer base?”

Yanarella, the story notes, has led the build-out of a writing staff of 300, all of whom are paid. And the content that staff creates led Adweek to also name B/R as the Hottest in Sports Media on its annual Hot List.

That’s the bragging part. Here’s the message part: Heine notes that before coming to Bleacher Report, “Yanarella carved out a ham-and-egger journalism career with print publications like the Hudson Valley News in upstate New York and Wizard magazine.”

I won’t give away Joe’s age. He’s younger than I am but old enough to have voted for or against Ronald Reagan for president. That also means he’s old enough to have been well into that journalism career before the mobile revolution, before Web 2.0 and even before the web. But he remade himself not just as a digital journalist, but as an innovative leader in an area—mobile- and social-first content—that didn’t exist for his first quarter-century in the business.

It seems to me the key to a successful media career in the foreseeable future will be the ability to remake oneself, to evolve, adapt and even lead in environments that are in flux or new. Joe Yanarella is a great example of that.

When Philip Doyle agreed to put his medical career on hold in order to focus on his Olympic preparation, he did so with more than a touch of reluctance.

Doyle, 27, has never hidden the fact that medicine is his first love. One that will form the basis of his professional life once he is content with his rowing achievements.

In 2018 he walked away from rowing for a period because of the impact it was having on his career as a doctor, but the allure of Tokyo 2020 was just enough to bring him back under the agreement that medicine would resume centre stage by the end of the Olympic year.

Such plans have now been blighted by the coronavirus pandemic which has seen the Olympics postponed until 2021.

For Doyle, the cards have fallen in such a way that medicine is now, without question, the priority.

“I was only on the phone last week begging for a job,” said Doyle, who started work on the general medicine ward of Newry’s Daisy Hill Hospital last Wednesday.

“The medicine was there long before the rowing was ever in my life, it’s always been my main number one driving force.

“I think I was a bit begrudging in the beginning, having to give all of me to the rowing so this break allows me to finish off my foundation year.”

It is a change of pace in every aspect, with Doyle now back in his family home having spent much of his time training in Cork prior to the news of the Olympic postponement.

The utility room and the garage have been transformed into a “dirty room”, where Doyle can change his clothes and wash upon returning from a shift before stepping inside the house, in order to minimise the risk of spreading Covid-19.

‘I have to see through my Olympic ambition’

It is not even two weeks since the Olympic postponement was announced, and already life in training camp feels something of a distant memory.

It is not, however, a permanent state of affairs and even for Doyle, for whom circumstance has accelerated a long-held desire to prioritise his medical career, there is unfinished business that must be attended to.

“I have to see this through,” says Doyle, who secured Olympic qualification with double sculls partner Ronan Byrne at last year’s World Cup, in which they secured a silver medal.

“Myself and Ronan have put ourselves into a position where we can really fight for a medal.

“I’ve said it to myself so many times that I’m a medal contender and I want to prove that right and prove that we can bring a medal back.

Move over, Usain Bolt. Britney Spears is the fastest human ever … according to herself.

The 38-year-old singer posted a since-deleted photo on Instagram of her phone timer on 5.97 seconds Wednesday with the caption “Ran my first 5!!!! Getting over your fear of pushing it in the beginning is key … once I did that I hit 5 !!!! Usually I run 6 or 7 … my first try was 9 … and now I did it whoop !!!!! 100 meter dash!”

Impressive, Britney. Except if she actually pulled this off she would’ve absolutely obliterated Usain Bolt’s 100-meter world record by more than 3.5 seconds. Her alleged attempts of six, seven and eight seconds also would’ve shattered the record Bolt set in 2009 at the IAAF World Championships in Berlin with a time of 9.58 seconds.

Nobody knows for certain what Spears did in 5.97 seconds, but less than 24 hours later she deleted the photo and said her impressive dash was a joke in a new post captioned “obviously I was joking about running the 100 meter dash in 5.97 seconds …. the world record is held by Usain Bolt which is 9.58 seconds …. but you better believe I’m coming for the world record!”

It seems self-quarantining is making all of us lose our minds.

Thumbnail photo via Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports Images