The Summer Olympics 2020 will be held in Tokyo from July 23 to August 8 – everything about the XXXII Olympic Games in 2021: schedule, sports, medal forecast, the status of the Russian team, why Russia plays under a neutral flag and without an anthem, where to watch
Olympics 2020: dates, medals, calendar – Tokyo Games guide
The XXXII Summer Olympic Games will be held in the Japanese capital Tokyo from July 23 to August 8, 2021. These are the world's largest sports competitions, in which about 11,000 athletes from more than 200 countries are expected to take part. They will perform in 33 sports and compete for 339 sets of awards. The Tokyo Games were supposed to take place in the summer of 2020, but were postponed exactly one year due to the pandemic. At the same time, it was still decided to leave the name "Olympics-2020". The Paralympic Games, which are supposed to be held in Tokyo from August 24 to September 5, 2021, have also been postponed by a year.
Olympic Games 2020: dates, opening and closing ceremonies
The opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics is scheduled for Friday, July 23, 2021 at 14.00 Moscow time (20.00 local time). And the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games – on Sunday, August 8, at 14.00 Moscow time (at 20.00 local time). Both events will last approximately three hours. A number of competitions are planned to start before the opening ceremony. Football and baseball tournaments will start on July 21st. And the qualifying competitions in archery and rowing are on July 23. But most of the starts are held after July 24th. Thus, the Olympics will take 19 days in total.
Tokyo won the right to host the Olympics on September 7, 2013, ahead of Spanish Madrid and Turkish Istanbul in the IOC competition. The games were supposed to start on July 24, 2020, but four months before they began, under pressure from the sports community in the midst of the IOC pandemic, the organizing committee and the government of Japan decided to postpone the competition to the summer of 2021. This has led to a major reshuffling of everything in the global sports calendar. The cumulative losses amounted to several billion dollars. As new waves of the pandemic emerged, the likelihood of the Games being canceled or rescheduled remained high. Although the IOC and the Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games 2020 have consistently stated their intention to hold the competition at all costs.
2020 Summer Olympics program
The Tokyo Olympics are the first Summer Games, the program of which is formed based on the new principles of the IOC. In general, they suggest a green light for new disciplines – primarily for youth and those promoted by the organizers of specific OIs. In addition, the proportion of women's medal draws and the number of mixed competitions are increasing.In Tokyo 2020, 339 sets of medals will be distributed instead of 306 to Rio 2016, while the number of participants in the games remains approximately the same as five years ago.
Games-2020 debut karate, rock climbing, surfing and skateboard. After a break, baseball and softball are returned to the program, which insisted the Japanese. Also for the first time on adult competitions, we will see the basketball 3×3, Freestyle-BMX, as well as mixed relay in swimming and athletics, mixed team competitions in Judo, triathlon and archery. Many of these disciplines were created on the go and did not have time to pass serious tested at the level of the elite. In a skateboard, at the time of inclusion in the game program, there was no dominant international federation with recognized rules.
Therefore, the experiments of the IOC with new species, many consider adventurous attempts to have time for a rapidly changing world. At the same time, at least two traditional sports are in an extremely difficult situation. The International Boxing Federation due to corruption scandals was deprived of the recognition of the IOC, and the Olympic tournament in Tokyo holds a special working group. Heavy athletics against the background of endless doping scandals, Miraculously retained a place in the game program, but it is obvious that the Olympic future of this sport is very foggy.
Translations of the Olympiad in Russia are divided between the three TV channels – the first, VGTRK and "Match TV". The opening ceremony will show the first, the detailed distribution of starts has not yet been made public. The main difficulty in organizing televisions will be a six-hour time difference between Moscow and Tokyo. As a result, many competitions will begin at 3 am Moscow time. A separate headache is a swimming tournament, in which the forces of the interests of the American viewer, the final swims are set in the morning session, and the preliminary – in the evening. By 17:00 Moscow time, the main mass of the competition in Tokyo will end.
