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President Donald Trump’s suggestion to postpone the Tokyo Olympics for a year because of the spreading coronavirus was immediately shot down by Japan’s Olympic minister. “The IOC and the organizing committee are not considering cancellation or a postponement — absolutely not at all,” Seiko Hashimoto, an Olympic bronze medalist, told a news conference on Friday in Tokyo. The International Olympic Committee and Tokyo organizers have stayed on message since the viral outbreak in China three months ago spread across Asia and then the globe: The games will open as schedule on July 24.

President Donald Trump has suggested Olympic officials postpone the 2020 Games in Tokyo over coronavirus fears ... saying it's better to delay than perform without crowds.

Japan could lose more than £11billion if the Tokyo Olympics are cancelled over coronavirus fears, while private firms face further losses of more than £6billion, it is feared. The £9.6billion bill for the Olympics including huge taxpayer spending on a new national stadium would be regarded as wasted if the Games are cancelled. In addition, experts say that Japan's tourism industry could suffer a £1.7billion blow if the expected millions of spectators do not materialise - bringing Japan's total losses to £11.3billion. On top of that, private companies have already shelled out billions for sponsorship and media contracts while the...

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics are a $25 billion operation. They’re the subject of dreams, of entire lives of training, of a decade of intensive planning. It makes sense, then, that organizers would go to considerable lengths to quell fears that a mysterious coronavirus could impact the Games. “Preparations,” the IOC has said in a blanket statement, “continue as planned.” And Tokyo organizing committee CEO Toshiro Muto: “Our basic thoughts are that we will go ahead with the Olympic and Paralympic Games as scheduled.” Yet as COVID-19’s global case toll reached 80,000 this week, and as the disease spread throughout Asia...

A senior member of the International Olympic Committee said Tuesday that if it proves too dangerous to hold the Olympics in Tokyo this summer because of the coronavirus outbreak, organizers are more likely to cancel it altogether than to postpone or move it. Dick Pound, a former Canadian swimming champion who has been on the IOC since 1978, making him its longest-serving member, estimated there is a three-month window — perhaps a two-month one — to decide the fate of the Tokyo Olympics, meaning a decision could be put off until late May. ...

Flanked by members of the famed "Miracle on Ice" U.S. Olympic hockey team, President Trump celebrated the team's captivating 1980 performance at a campaign rally on Friday. Forty years removed from defeating the Russian hockey team in the semi-finals of the 1980 Olympic Games, Trump honored the U.S. team's historic victory by bringing captain Mike Eruzione and coach Herb Brooks's daughter onstage during a campaign stop in Las Vegas. The team stood behind Trump as the president ran through his stump speech and lashed out at the fake news media. The players wore red Make America Great Again hats and...

President Trump kicked off his West Coast trip this week by meeting with leaders from the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Committee.“From the day I took office, I’ve done everything in my power to make sure that LA achieved the winning bid,” he told local organizers. “Now, for the third time in history, the city of Los Angeles—the ‘City of Angels’—will once again raise up the Olympic Torch and welcome the world’s greatest competitors to the Summer Games.”🏅WATCH: In LA, Team USA will keep on winning!The 2028 Games will boost much more than America’s gold medal tally: It’s expected to be...

The highest profile casualty of the raging Covid-19 outbreak might yet be the 2020 Summer Olympic Games set to open in Tokyo, Japan on July 24, and Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo is moving heaven and earth to ensure this disaster doesn't occur. Since the end of January, PM Abe has gone on a high-profile media blitz to ensure countries, athletes and millions of Olympic tourists of their safety from Covid-19 in the Summer Games, which start July 24 and ends August 9 at different venues around the country. Abe's consistent message: the Tokyo Olympics won't be postponed. On February...

A biologically male marathon runner who identifies as a transgender woman is set to compete in the USA Olympic trials later in February. Megan Youngren “is set to make history on Feb. 29 as the first openly transgender athlete to compete at the U.S. Olympic marathon trials,” Sports Illustrated reported. Youngren qualified for the trials after a strong performance on Dec. 8, 2019, in the California International Marathon. “People will try to put it down by saying, ‘That’s too easy because you’re trans.’ But what about the 500 other women who will qualify?” Youngren told the magazine. “There’s probably someone...

Megan Youngren will become the first openly transgender female athlete to compete at the United States Olympic marathon trials. The 29-year-old will make history on February 29 in Atlanta, where she will compete against 63 women for a spot on the Olympic team to compete at the Summer Games in Tokyo later this year. Youngren began her transition from a male to a female when she was a college student in 2011, according to Sports Illustrated. She also started taking hormone medication that year, and in 2012, she came out publicly as transgender. She officially finalized her transition last year,...

TOKYO -- Tokyo Olympic organizers and the International Olympic Committee said Friday there is no “Plan B” for the 2020 Games, which open in just over five months and have been jolted by the outbreak of a virus in neighboring China. The coronavirus has infected almost 64,000 people globally with almost 1,400 deaths in China, but only one in Japan where fear is rising with so much attention focused on the outbreak. “Certainly the advice we're received externally from the WHO (World Health Organization) is that there's no case for any contingency plans or cancelling the games or moving the...

Erin Gregoire crossed the finish line of the Houston Marathon, looked at her watch, and smiled. In her debut at the distance, she ran 2:42:55—well under the qualifying time of 2:45:00 she needed for the Olympic Marathon Trials. In what has become a complex case, however, Gregoire was denied entry into the Trials, because the differential between her gun time (2:54:54) and chip time (her 2:42:55) was too large. And the day of the Houston Marathon (January 19) was the final day of qualifying, so it was her last shot at getting into the race. “Obviously it was an incredible...

Imposing neutrality by fiat requires a certain hubris. The International Olympic Committee demonstrated that it has that in abundant supply when it forbade activism by athletes at the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, prohibiting “gestures of a political nature, like a hand gesture or kneeling.” The policy, announced last week, added precision to a longstanding - and controversial - rule in the Olympic Charter stating, “No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” The IOC’s guidelines were not only a response to a global zeitgeist of athletes’...

I came across this while searching for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. I enjoyed the music even more, seeing their interpretation and the Russian crowd’s enthusiastic response. Ilinykh – Katsalapov, Swan Lake, 2014 Olympics

The sole female Iranian Olympic medalist has defected. Kimia Alizadeh bid farewell and has relocated to Europe. It is reported she has gone to the Netherlands. The bronze medalist in Taekwondo posted her letter of farewell on Instagram just one day after the Iranian government admitted it shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet. She wrote in Farsi. “Let me start with a greeting, a farewell or condolences,” the 21-year–old wrote in an Instagram post explaining why she was defecting. “I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran who they have been playing with for years.”“They took...

Kimia Alizadeh, the sole woman to ever have won a medal at the Olympics for the country of Iran, has defected from the country and moved to Europe, she announced on social media. The 21-year-old, who won bronze at the 2016 summer Olympics in Rio in the women's Taekwondo 57-kg competition, wrote on Instagram Saturday that she is "one of the millions of oppressed woman in Iran." "They took me wherever they wanted. Whatever they said I wore. Every sentence they ordered I repeated," Alizadeh said. "Whenever they saw fit, they confiscated me. They put my medals on the obligatory...

Concern mounted Thursday in Iran over the fate of the Islamic republic’s only woman to have won an Olympic medal, who is believed to want to settle in The Netherlands. Kimia Alizadeh clinched a taekwondo bronze medal at the Rio Olympics in 2016, drawing praise from her compatriots including the country’s President Hassan Rouhani and even conservatives in the Islamic Republic. In keeping with Iran’s strict Muslim custom, Alizadeh, then 18, competed wearing a head scarf over her taekwondo uniform and protective gear. There were high hopes she would compete at the Tokyo Olympics later this year and bring home...

I still vividly recall watching the live announcement in September of 1990 by the International Olympic Committee awarding the Centennial Olympic Games (held in the summer of 1996) to the city of Atlanta. As the boisterous cheers after the initial announcement demonstrated, much of the whole state of Georgia was giddy with excitement. From Gainesville to Savannah, Olympic venues were built or otherwise prepared all over the state, and Georgia comedian Jeff Foxworthy promised the world that the Georgia Olympics would have its own distinct Southern flavor. I’m not much of a fan of the Olympics, so I didn’t get...

Lausanne (AFP) - The World Anti-Doping Agency on Monday banned Russia for four years from major global sporting events including the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2022 World Cup in Qatar over manipulated doping data, prompting an angry response from President Vladimir Putin. WADA's executive committee, meeting in Lausanne, handed Russia the "robust" four-year suspension after accusing Moscow of falsifying data from a doping testing laboratory that was handed over to investigators earlier this year. The toughest ever sanctions imposed on Russian state authorities will see government officials barred from attending any major events, while the country will lose the...

Next year’s Tokyo Summer Olympics may spell the swift death of the transgender movement as a dominant politically-correct touchstone. Biological men, self-identifying as women, are poised to make a clean sweep of the Women’s Olympics, triggering a very public debate on this third-rail subject. That firestorm, pitting pro-women feminists against extreme pro-transgender progressives, will begin July 24th, just as the Presidential sweepstakes moves into its sprint to the finish line. The International Olympic Committee -- the IOC -- recently admitted they couldn’t come up with fair guidelines governing how and when transgender women can compete as women, against biological women....