Japan’s Olympic chief has greeted Sapporo’s decision to bid for the 2026 Winter Games with lukewarm cautiousness, mindful of Asian overkill with Olympics due in the region in 2018 and 2020.
Japan Olympic Committee (JOC) president Tsunekasu Takeda admitted it would not be an easy sell for the northern city, which also staged the Winter Games in 1972.
“It’s fantastic that a Japanese city is planning to bid and Sapporo is so passionate about it,” Takeda told local media. “But there are a lot of hurdles. Of course the JOC would like to see the plan at the earliest opportunity and consider it carefully.”
“We hope to see a good plan from the city,” he added.
The JOC is the final arbiter of which Japanese city’s bid — if any — goes forward to the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
The next Winter Olympics is to be held in 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea, and Tokyo won the race to stage the 2020 Summer Games. Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan, are fighting it out for the rights to the Winter Games two years later.
Sapporo’s decision to bid comes more than a year after Tokyo beat Istanbul and Madrid for the right to host the 2020 Summer Olympics, the Japanese capital’s second after the 1964 Games.
Japan also hosted the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano.
Sapporo, on Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, regularly hosts World Cup ski jumping competitions. City officials estimate the Olympics would cost ¥405 billion (US$3.5 billion).
If the city’s bid is endorsed, the JOC can submit it to the IOC in 2017. The IOC is scheduled to make its formal selection two years later.
The 2020 Tokyo Games are expected to boost the Japanese economy by an estimated ¥3 trillion (US$25 billion) as building and tourism-related stimulus power growth, with about half the bonanza going into Tokyo’s coffers.
However, there is growing disquiet over the spiraling cost and the perception that vast resources are being spent on the already well-off capital city — instead of on reconstruction in tsunami-damaged areas of Japan’s northeast.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier