Tokyo 2020: New date for the Olympic & Paralympic Games announced

The Games will no longer be taking place this year

The Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games will take place in the summer of 2021, organisers have announced.

The Games were meant to be happening this year, in July and August, in Japan but they've had to be rescheduled because of the global coronavirus outbreak.

In a joint statement, the International Olympic Committee - which runs the Olympic event - and the Tokyo 2020 organising committee said they will run from 23 July to 8 August 2021.

They have also confirmed that the Paralympic Games will take place in 2021, running from 24 August through to 5 September.

The Olympic Games are supposed to take place every four years, with the last Games taking place in Rio De Janeiro, in Brazil, in 2016.

Hundreds of athletes from all over the world take part in the events and have been vigorously training for years.

The Olympic and Paralympic Games were supposed to take place in Tokyo this year. However, when large numbers of coronavirus cases started appearing across the world, the decision was made to postpone the two events.

The organisers were also under pressure to reschedule the Games after the several major nations announced that they wouldn't attend.

Canada became the first country to officially pull out of the games, while Australia said they were going to tell their athletes to start preparing for an event in 2021.

The Olympics has been cancelled before in 1916, during World War One, and in 1940 and 1944, because of World War Two, but the event has never been postponed, so deciding to do this now was a huge decision.