At last, International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach gave what appeared to be a candid answer to a question from the media when he was asked whether he had experienced any doubts the delayed Olympic Games would go ahead in Tokyo.

"In these 15 months, we had doubts every day," Bach told a media roundtable yesterday.

"The real challenge on a personal note was that you could not speak about this, because everybody was uncertain.

"The IOC as the leader of the Olympic Movement would have added to the uncertainty - this could or would have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"How can you convince an athlete to keep training, to go to the next qualification event... if you do not show confidence?"

While this may be a fair point, the trouble is it is easy for Bach to say when an Olympics that are set to be unlike any other to have gone before are just eight days away.

Athletes are arriving in their droves for training camps, while officials and thousands of media representatives have also begun to descend on the Japanese capital. To cancel now would have been senseless.

Throughout the entire period since the IOC announced last March that Tokyo 2020 would instead be held in 2021, the organisation and its Japanese counterparts have refused to entertain any possibility that the Games would be cancelled.

Speculation about the fate of the event has been rife, and the IOC would have been negligent if it had not been at least considering a second postponement or calling it off entirely, such has been the level of global concern over the COVID-19 virus.

As is often the case with Olympic matters - and indeed any organisation such as the IOC - it is about perception. The IOC needed to be seen to be pressing ahead despite the pandemic, for the athletes they claim to represent - even if the secret backroom discussions carried a rather different tone.

An almost overwhelming negative sentiment has been present ever since Bach touched down in Japan last week, and it is a trend he and the IOC are struggling to arrest.

Bach is perhaps the most pilloried man in the host country at this moment in time, but the IOC President has not helped himself.

Does he really need to make the 800 kilometres journey from a place under a state of emergency - even if that is a strong term for a set of regulations that cannot legally be enforced - to Hiroshima for what is essentially a glorified photo opportunity?

At a time where almost every Olympic participant is limited to specific places approved by the Japanese Government, does he really need to be swanning around Tokyo for meetings he could just as easily hold online? After all, that is what Bach has been doing from the suite of the Lausanne Palace for months.

Not only that, but this week he slipped up by referring to "Chinese people" instead of Japanese people during a visit to the Organising Committee’s headquarters, his first public appearance in Tokyo since he emerged from the mandatory three-day quarantine.

Bach may have quickly corrected himself and was perhaps unfortunate that these comments were available to the media, but that did not prevent another social media backlash.

It is little wonder Bach has spent the last few days on a charm offensive in Japan, where the phrase "Bach go home" was briefly trending on Twitter shortly after his arrival here.

Today the German lawyer claimed holding the Games would be a "great moment for Tokyo and also for Japan, because billions of people worldwide will be glued to their screen and will greatly admire, and be grateful, to the people of Tokyo and people of Japan for what they have achieved under these very difficult circumstances".

Opinion polls and general public feeling would suggest otherwise. Many Japanese citizens are seemingly merely hoping that the Games come and go without any disasters, instead of revelling in what is supposed to be a sporting celebration.

"We are trying to address the concerns," Bach said.

"We always knew there was scepticism among the population and that there are very special circumstances about which the population is concerned and which transferred to the Olympic Games.

"We take this seriously but in such a situation, and with such a project as the Olympics, it is normal that there are different opinions.

"We are very confident that once the Japanese people realise that we have done everything to minimise the risk as much as we could, and when the athletes finally compete, that this will be well appreciated here."

Judging by recent events, the Japanese public is not convinced and Bach and the IOC have some way to go before this claim is anywhere near to becoming reality.