I can barely plan ahead for what I’m doing tomorrow let alone 5 years from now, but the Olympics organization has a plan. In 5 years, the Summer Olympic Games are set to take place in Tokyo, Japan. They even have a logo designed for it… ooor so they thought.

In July 2015, the new logo for the 2020 Olympic Games, designed by Kenjiro Sano, was revealed to the world. Just two months later, Olympics organizers have pulled the logo after allegations of plagiarism.

Designer, Olivier Debie, has compared the 2020 Olympics logo to one he created in 2011 for the Théâtre de Liège in Belgium. The similarities aren’t hard to see.

I’ll give him the fact that he added color to the design and even added the red circle mimicking the Japanese flag. Ooooh wait…

This was a logo created in the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese tsunami by Barcelona-based Hey Studio. Did Sano just have no imagination for the 2020 Olympics logo? The similarities between his logo and these two others are just to obvious to deny. Maybe the designer for the next 2020 Olympics logo will have a bit more originality.

Kristen Oaxaca, Senior Graphic Designer