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With the Tokyo Olympics set to open every week from Friday, organizers hope to see excellent athletic feats making a extra lasting impression than the empty seats and different setbacks stemming from the coronavirus pandemic.
Having determined earlier within the yr to exclude spectators touring from abroad, the organizers introduced simply weeks earlier than the opening ceremony that the overwhelming majority of the video games can be held behind closed doorways amid one other COVID-19 state of emergency in Tokyo.
(From L) The silver, gold and bronze medals for the Tokyo Olympics. (Kyodo) ==Kyodo
Issues concerning the virus have additionally prompted the Japanese Olympic Committee to again away from its bold medal goal and as a substitute emphasize defending the well being of athletes.
JOC President Yasuhiro Yamashita mentioned Japan’s goal of a document 30 gold medals, established earlier than the coronavirus pressured a one-year postponement of the video games, is now much less of a precedence to the host nation.
“If I am requested whether or not it is necessary to realize 30 (gold medals), I wish to clearly say ‘no,'” Yamashita mentioned at a latest press convention in Tokyo.
Japan recorded its largest-ever haul of 16 gold medals on house soil on the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and later equaled the mark on the 2004 Athens Video games. It received 41 whole medals in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, probably the most ever, however solely 12 had been gold.
Regardless of the last tally this summer season, the nation’s place on the medal desk is more likely to be underpinned by the efficiency of its judoka.
Japan’s judo depth was on show final December when reigning males’s 66-kilogram world champion Joshiro Maruyama missed Olympic choice after dropping a dramatic winner-take-all playoff towards Hifumi Abe for the ultimate spot on the crew.
Uta Abe (blue) in February 2020. (Kyodo)
Abe and youthful sister Uta, who will contest the ladies’s 52-kg class, are two of probably the most recognizable faces amongst a Japanese judo squad that may contend for medals in nearly each weight class.
Rio de Janeiro gold medalist Shohei Ono is favored to go back-to-back as males’s 73-kg champion, whereas Akira Sone would be the judoka to beat within the girls’s over-78-kg heavyweight division.
Japan’s wrestlers are additionally predicted to function prominently within the medal tally, with the ladies carrying a lot of the expectation after profitable 4 out of six gold medals on supply in 2016.
Rio 63-kg champion Risako Kawai has moved right down to 57 kg, making approach for her youthful sister Yukako to battle for Japan at 62 kg.
On the badminton court docket, world No. 1 and back-to-back world champion Kento Momota will enter the lads’s singles as the new favourite, whereas the world No. 1 pair of Yuki Fukushima and Sayaka Hirota can be anticipated to high the ladies’s doubles podium.
Kento Momota in December 2020. (Kyodo)
Whereas the return to the pool of leukemia survivor Rikako Ikee can be headline materials, Japan’s greatest hopes for gold on the Tokyo Aquatics Centre are more likely to be Daiya Seto within the males’s 400-meter particular person medley and teenager Shoma Sato within the males’s 200 breaststroke.
Japan’s male gymnasts will attempt to defend their crew gold medal minus two-time all-around particular person champion “King Kohei” Uchimura, who will focus solely on the horizontal bar.
Set for her Olympic debut, four-time Grand Slam winner Naomi Osaka will let her tennis do the speaking after being informed she will choose out of media conferences in mild of her lately revealed struggles with despair and anxiousness.
Amongst newly launched sports activities, world champion Tomoa Narasaki is in rivalry to win the inaugural gold medal in males’s sports activities climbing, whereas teen sensation Misugu Okamoto might develop into the primary Olympic champion in girls’s park skateboarding.
With karate debuting on the video games, Japan is effectively positioned for a number of medals, whereas the hosts must also make sturdy bids for the primary baseball and softball gold medals on supply because the 2008 Beijing Video games.
The Japanese girls’s and males’s soccer groups have said their ambitions of reaching the highest of the rostrum, however a difficult street lies forward of each.
For Asako Takakura’s Nadeshiko Japan, the trail to a gold medal will virtually actually run by means of a dominant United States outfit on a historic unbeaten streak and trying to regain the Olympic title they didn’t win in Rio de Janeiro, the primary time they missed gold since 2000.
As ever, Brazil will enter as a males’s soccer medal favourite, trying to attain the rostrum at a fourth straight video games after lastly getting over the hump and profitable their first gold at house in 2016.
One different fixed of latest video games, dash king Usain Bolt, has vacated his throne, which means the lads’s athletics 100 and 200-meter sprints can be received by somebody apart from the Jamaican for the primary time since 2008.
American sprinter Trayvon Bromell ran 9.80 seconds within the U.S. Olympic trials, 0.03 off his world-leading time for 2021, to cement his place as 100 favourite, however his compatriots Ronnie Baker and Fred Kerley will function. Canada’s Andre de Grasse and South Africa’s Akani Simbine are different names to look at.
Noah Lyles or Kenneth Bednarek of the U.S. look to be those to beat over 200, whereas two-time gold medalist Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce will maintain the Jamaican flag flying within the girls’s dash occasions.
The video games’ new sports activities will present a possibility for some established stars to emerge in entrance of a brand new viewers.
American skateboard famous person Nyjah Huston — a tattooed pioneer of the game — will go head-to-head with clean-cut Japanese prodigy Yuto Horigome in males’s avenue.
Yuto Horigome. (Kyodo)
Bleach-blonde Brazilian surf sensation Italo Ferreira is about to battle for gold with the likes of Hawaiian pipeline hero John John Florence and French veteran Jeremy Flores.
One of the best of the ladies — Australians Sally Fitzgibbons and Stephanie Gilmore, American Carissa Moore and France’s Johanne Defay — will entertain, if the waves off the Chiba Prefecture coast cooperate.
The weeks main as much as the video games haven’t been type to some, with a couple of big-name cyclists pressured to withdraw after incidents on the ongoing Tour de France.
Three-time world champion Peter Sagan of Slovakia was injured in France and needed to endure surgical procedure, whereas Australian Jack Haig broke his collarbone in a crash. The Tokyo Video games’ uncharacteristically mountainous Olympic course meant the previous was by no means more likely to problem for gold, however Haig was an enormous hope for his nation.
Additionally struggling unexpectedly is the American males’s basketball crew, with the 2021 iteration of the often untouchable Dream Workforce dropping to Australia and Nigeria in exhibition warm-ups.
Whether or not they can proper the ship to win their fourth straight Olympic title, and sixteenth in 20 video games, might show an fascinating storyline. There’s much less jeopardy across the American girls, as they give the impression of being set to march to a seventh straight gold.
It could be the tip of the Olympic street for Briton Andy Murray, once-retired and now on the lookout for a 3rd straight males’s singles tennis title, because the 34-year-old comes off a lean 2021.
Novak Djokovic appears primed to take the title, quickly after bagging his record-equaling twentieth Grand Slam win in Wimbledon, with Russian Daniil Medvedev and Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas attainable challengers.
One of many largest questions is how the coronavirus might affect the result of occasions. Whereas organizers, together with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s authorities, have repeatedly said Olympians and the Japanese public can be secure from an infection, the opportunity of athletes being sidelined because of the coronavirus stays.
With the organizers decided to maintain the give attention to the sporting enviornment and away from the pandemic, it’s an final result they are going to desperately hope to keep away from.
Associated protection:
Olympians may break quarantine to compete if pre-event test negative
IOC’s Bach asked Japan PM to allow fans at Olympics if COVID state improves
COVID-19 infections in Tokyo hit 6-month high as post-Olympics surge feared
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