Japan’s crowdless sport: A prelude to virus-hit Games?
TOKYO: A line of masked spectators raises muffled cheers for elite marathon runners, and a baseball bat’s thud on a ball echoes around a vast, empty stadium: Sport in Tokyo this weekend set the tone for how a coronavirus-hit Olympic Games could play out.
For the first time ever, Japan’s professional baseball teams staged pre-season openers behind closed doors after the country dramatically escalated its response to the global coronavirus epidemic by closing schools and cancelling mass events.
In Tokyo, Sunday’s staging of the annual marathon, which last year saw close to 38,000 amateur participants, was scaled back to just a few hundred professional athletes, with the public strongly discouraged from lining the route. In past years the event attracted more than 1 million roadside spectators. “If the Olympics look like this, it’s going to be a sad sight,” said 68-year-old shoemaker Hiroshi Enomoto, one of the fistful of spectators cheering on the runners in the downtown area of Asakusa.
The Olympic marathon itself has been moved to Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido because of worries over Tokyo’s scorching summer heat, but Enomoto
and others wondered whether this weekend’s crowdless events were a harbinger of things to come. “There are maybe 20% of the number of people who came to see the race last year. Normally, it’s so packed you can barely breathe,” said Enomoto, who remembers seeing the 1964 Olympic torch relay passing through Asakusa.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the president of the International Olympic Committee Thomas Bach have said the Games will go ahead. Bach said his organization was “fully committed” to the July 24 start, dismissing other options as “speculation”.
BWF URGED TO EXTEND QUALIFICATION PERIOD
NEWDELHI: Indian shuttlers Saina Nehwal and Parupalli Kashyap have urged badminton’s governing body to reconsider its decision not to extend the qualification period for the Tokyo Games despite several events being cancelled or postponed due to the coronavirus.
“It will be unfair for most of the players who are really close to qualifying for Olympics 2020,” Nehwal said on Twitter.
Nehwal’s husband Kashyap also expressed his concern. “I hope all the athletes have a fair chance to qualify for the Olympics,” Kashyap tweeted.