Ko to represent New Zealand at Tokyo Games
WELLINGTON, New Zealand, July 7, (AP): Rio de Janeiro silver medalist Lydia Ko will represent New Zealand in golf at the Tokyo Olympics.
The former world No. 1 has been selected along with Europe-based professional Ryan Fox in the New Zealand team for Tokyo. Fox also competed at Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
Ko was the youngest player, male or female, to win a professional tournament when she did so, aged 14, at the New South Wales Open in 2012. She was the youngest player at 15 to win an LPGA Tour Event and the youngest at 18 to win a major championship when she captured the 2015 Evian Championship.
The South Korea-born Ko will go into the Olympic tournament in good form after winning her first LPGA title since 2018 at the Lotte Championship this year. Fox, who has played on the European Tour since 2016, is the son of former All Blacks flyhalf Grant Fox.
Meanwhile, famous athletes in sports like tennis and golf heading to the Tokyo Olympics will probably arrive in Japan at the front of the plane.
It’s a style to which the athletes of the Pacific Islands are unaccustomed. Fiji’s gold medal-winning men’s rugby sevens team will arrive in Tokyo along with the other members of their national team on Thursday on a cargo/freight flight which is hauling mostly frozen fish.
Commercial passenger flights to and from Pacific nations have become scarce during the pandemic. Lorraine Mar, the chief executive of the Fiji Association of Sports and National
Olympic Committee, said Wednesday that arranging travel for the Fiji team to Tokyo has been a “logistical challenge.”
Mar said around 51 athletes and officials, mostly the Fiji men’s and women’s sevens squad, will be on Thursday’s flight from Fiji’s principal international airport at Nadi. It’s a regularly-scheduled freight flight which has some capacity for passengers.
The sevens teams recently have been based in Australia where the Fiji men won the Oceania Sevens title in Townsville, Queensland two weeks ago.