Japanese towns drop plans to host Tokyo Olympic athletes due to COVID-19 surge

With the Tokyo Olympics just over two months away, 31 Japanese municipalities have decided against hosting overseas athletes and conducting cultural exchange programs, according to Kyodo News. The decision comes after a surge in COVID-19 cases in the country as well as globally.

In a first-of-its-kind program for the Olympics and Paralympics, 528 municipalities had registered to greet athletes from 184 countries, according to reports.

A delegation from East Timor was set to visit Ono City in Fukui Prefecture but later backed out. The British wheelchair basketball team and Russia’s fencing team called off their training camps in Japan. And on Wednesday, the United States Athletics Federation canceled its pre-Olympic training camp in Chiba Prefecture over concerns about the athletes' safety.

According to the news agency, the government has already started tracking the host cities that are not participating as planned.

“It is a shame they have decided to cancel, but I believe they made the best decision possible in the current situation,” Chiba governor Toshihito Kumagai said. The Japanese city was planning to host nearly 120 members from the US athletics team to provide them training facilities across three cities.

Earlier, the International Olympic Committee expressed their confidence about the country's measures to counter the deadly virus, stating that the Tokyo Olympics would be a historic event. World Athletics chief Sebastian Coe also praised the Games' organizing committee for staging a marathon test event a few days ago.

Anti-Tokyo Olympics petition gains thousands of signatures

Meanwhile, the anti-Olympic petition that was floated a week ago has garnered 346,596 signatures as of this writing. Aimed at IOC president Thomas Bach and Japanese PM Yoshihide Suga, the petition state that the Tokyo Olympics should be scrapped or postponed in order to save people’s lives.