Coe’s persuasive plea

Olympic sports must do more to persuade Japanese people about how much work they have done to organise a safe Tokyo Games, athletics leader Sebastian Coe said yesterday. Public opinion in Japan consistently favours cancelling the Olympics that open on July 23. This is despite sports bodies working thousands of hours to create health protocols and ‘‘understanding the nature of the challenge’’, World Athletics president Coe told a meeting of Summer Games officials. ‘‘It does in large part seem to be the best kept secret in Japan,’’ Coe said of expertise gained organising events during the Covid-19 pandemic by 33 sports on the Tokyo programme. Coe, a two-time Olympic champion runner and former British lawmaker, said he had ‘‘never known an event with so much forethought put into the safety of all those involved’’. That message should be better communicated in Japan, he said.

The heart of Adam Goodes’ decision to decline the honour of entry into the Australian Football Hall of Fame is that he no longer feels a love for the game in which he became a champion. Sources close to Goodes said the dual Brownlow medallist and two-time premiership Swan did not wish to accept the honour of being admitted to the hall of fame while he felt estranged from football and the AFL, and no longer participated in the game at all. The sources said Goodes no longer attended AFL games, or even watched them regularly on television. The sources said it was hard to say when or if he would reconcile with the game and the AFL, having been hurt by the constant booing – which the AFL ultimately accepted had some racial motivations – in 2014 and 2015, and which led to him stepping away from playing in the 2015 season.