No official from Toyota, a sponsor of the Tokyo Olympics, will attend the opening ceremony on Friday, and the group will not air any TV commercials related to the event, a spokesperson for the Olympic Games told AFP on Monday. Japanese group.
The world's leading car manufacturer in 2020, Toyota is one of the major partners of the Olympic movement, involved in several Olympic Games and which contributed a total of $ 500 million for the Tokyo Games.
But these Olympics are poorly accepted by a large part of the Japanese population due to the persistence of the pandemic, and the event will take place almost entirely behind closed doors as cases of Covid-19 increase again in the capital.
"Toyota officials will not attend the opening ceremony, and the main reason is that there will be no spectators," a Toyota spokeswoman told AFP.
According to Japanese media, less than 1,000 Olympic officials and personalities, including representatives of sponsors, will be allowed to attend the ceremony.
No advertising related to the Olympics scheduled
The Toyota spokeswoman, however, denied reports from several local media that the automaker had canceled plans to broadcast television advertisements related to the Olympics in Japan.
Because "from the start there was never any question of broadcasting advertisements related to the Olympic Games (...) in Japan," she told
AFP
.
In addition to the main sponsors of the Olympic movement, which includes Toyota (as well as two other Japanese groups, Panasonic and Bridgestone), around sixty other Japanese companies had invested 3.3 billion dollars (approximately 2.8 billion EUR) in the Olympic Games. -2020, a record sum.
Their hopes for a positive spinoff have been dampened somewhat by the spectator ban, although sponsors can still count on international exposure via television and streaming.
Toyota considers that the maintenance of the Olympics is "difficult to understand" for the Japanese population.
Earlier Monday, Toyota communications director Jun Nagata also told reporters that sustaining the Tokyo Olympics had become "difficult to understand" for the Japanese people.
An outbreak of infections linked to the Olympics is feared, while the first cases of Covid-19 among athletes were reported this weekend at the Olympic Village.
At least 58 cases involving people involved in the Games have been recorded in Japan since July 1.
