Postponement of the Tokyo Olympics appeared increasingly inevitable Monday as a growing number of countries signaled that their athletes would not participate if the Games were held this summer and Japanese officials conceded for the first time that a delay was possible. 

A whirlwind 24-hour period started Sunday with International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach issuing a letter to Olympic athletes, saying the IOC was considering delaying the Summer Games because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Since 1896, the Summer Olympics have taken place every four years except for 1916, 1940 and 1944, when they were canceled because of world wars. Bach said a cancellation had been ruled out and that the IOC would consider different scenarios and make a final decision in the next four weeks.

That long timetable led Canada to call for a postponement Sunday night and say it would not send any athletes to Tokyo if the Games begin as scheduled July 24. Australia and Germany followed with a similar announcements Monday, and other countries, such as Britain, Brazil, Norway and Slovenia, either urged a postponement or said conditions must improve if they are to participate.

Later Monday, Dick Pound, the longest-serving IOC board member, told USA Today that "postponement has been decided," though the IOC gave no indication Monday that a delay was certain. In a request to comment on Pound's assertion, an IOC spokesman said, "It is the right of every IOC Member to interpret the decision of the IOC [executive board] which was announced yesterday."

Pound is one of 100 IOC members, having joined the committee in 1978. He is not one of the 15 members of the IOC's powerful executive board, which plays a pivotal role in all important Olympic matters.

Aruban IOC Executive Board member Nicole Hoevertsz said in an email Monday afternoon that the board "discussed and took a decision about" postponement Sunday, signaling the IOC had not changed its stance. She then pointed to the portion of IOC's official statement that said it would start discussions about postponement scenarios and was confident that those discussions would be completed within four weeks. Postponement of any length involves many complexities, with global and local ramifications on athletes and residents, sponsors and television networks.

Pound did not respond Monday to messages The Washington Post sent. He did speak to the Canadian Press, striking a less-definitive tone.

"You're looking at a postponement," Pound said. "I think that's out there now. ... We're all reading the tea leaves and so on, but the Japanese themselves are talking about postponing. A lot of National Olympic Committees and countries are calling for a postponement."

Until Monday, Japan had insisted that the Games must go ahead as scheduled, though Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said last week that the priority must be to hold the Olympics in a "complete manner." On Monday, he told parliament that this might mean the dates would have to change.

"If that is difficult, we would have no choice but to decide to postpone, with athletes as the first priority," Abe said, underlining that an outright cancellation is not an option.

Later Monday, Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee President Yoshiro Mori said it was time to consider alternatives.

"What we are going to do before anything else is to start by simulating about whether we postpone one month, three months, five months, one year," Mori said. "We need to make a simulation about the various scenarios."

Olympics Minister Seiko Hashimoto said she was "glad to hear" that the IOC was not considering canceling the Games, and Mori said the IOC and Japan would like to "closely examine" the various scenarios.

For athletes, ambiguity regarding postponement has led to frustration. Athletes have continued to train as facilities have shuttered and governments have imposed restrictions. Over the weekend, USA Swimming and USA Track & Field called for the Games to be postponed, with USA Swimming asking for a delay until 2021. Both federations cited protecting athletes' physical and mental health. USA Gymnastics joined them Monday after polling athletes over the weekend. Sebastian Coe, head of World Athletics, the international governing body for track and field, responded to Bach's letter Sunday by writing to Bach that the current schedule is "neither feasible nor desirable."

The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee said in a statement Sunday that it is "eager to explore alternatives," but that the country's governing body has yet to take a firm position on whether to halt the Olympics.

"Multiple athletes have expressed one thing among the many that would help reduce their anxiety is if the USOPC would at some point make a clear recommendation to the IOC on behalf of American athletes, in terms of what we would like to see," table tennis Olympian Xiao Han, the head of the USOPC's athlete advisory council, said in a phone interview Monday. "Even if not everybody agrees with it, I think having that will give athletes at least a piece of certainty in these uncertain times."

Germany on Monday became the latest country to announce that it would not send athletes to Tokyo this summer. Michael Schirp, a spokesman for the German team, said about 200 German athletes participated in a teleconference Saturday evening with the country's top Olympic officials to voice their concerns. They were given a survey to complete, gauging their willingness to compete this summer. Their feelings were supposed to guide the German response, Schirp said, but after the IOC said a decision could take another four weeks, Alfons Hörmann, head of the German Olympic committee, acted.

Britain joined them.

"If the virus continues as predicted by the Government, I don't think there is any way we can send a team," British Olympic Association chair Hugh Robertson told Sky Sports News.

Beyond determining what is feasible from a public health standpoint, postponement would be an enormously complicated undertaking.

For each scenario, organizers would have to work out whether they could still secure the Olympic venues for all 33 sports, as well as for the Paralympics, and what the costs would be. There are also doubts about the availability of some sites, including the Olympic Village, where hundreds of apartments have been sold by a consortium of real estate developers for occupancy after the Games had been scheduled to conclude Aug. 9, as well as the need to secure the planned media headquarters at the Tokyo Big Sight, a tightly booked conference center.

"We have to go through each of them one by one," Mori said. "Considering just these things alone would take an enormous time."

Mori hinted that organizers would prefer to keep the Olympics within this calendar year when he said: "We are 2020, so that is the direction for now."

For athletes, the length of a delay would alter drastically who is able to qualify or excel, with wide varieties depending on the sport. A long delay could mean some aging veterans miss the chance at a final Olympics. Some athletes, particularly female gymnasts, have small windows during which they are the best in the world and might prefer to compete closer to the time at which they had been preparing to peak.

NBC executives also have been in conversation with Olympic officials, and their wishes likely carry weight. More than 70% of the IOC's nearly $6 billion from the current four-year Olympic cycle comes from TV revenue. And of that TV revenue, NBC and parent company Comcast pay about half.

One former NBC executive believed the company would be satisfied with postponing the Games by a year. A shorter postponement - into the fall of this year, for instance, would force the Olympics to compete with football and a number of other events that already have been pushed from this spring, such as the Masters golf tournament. Additionally, advertisers have made commitments to other events later this year.

For now, organizers say they will push ahead with the torch relay, which is due to start Thursday in Fukushima in northeastern Japan and is meant to symbolize Japan's recovery from a 2011 tsunami and nuclear accident in the area. Mori said the prime minister was unsure whether he would attend the start of the relay - the government wanted to discourage crowds forming - although Mori said he would attend.

Mori acknowledged the relay route may need to be modified and said organizers were studying how it should be held given the fast-changing situation with the virus.

Tens of thousands of people flocked to a stadium in Sendai north of Tokyo to see the Olympic flame burning in a cauldron over the weekend after it arrived from Greece.

"We had a turnout nearly 10 times that we had estimated," Tokyo 2020 CEO Toshiro Muto said.

Muto said organizers should be happy with the turnout "in and of itself" but had placed risk as their top priority and has changed arrangements so people simply passed by the flame without a crowd forming.

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Denyer reported from Tokyo. The Washington Post's Ben Strauss in Washington and Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo contributed to this report.