Current time in Tokyo: July 24, 4:50 p.m.
TOKYO — A terrible last shot cost a Russian shooter the first gold medal of the 2020 Olympics.
In the women’s air rifle competition on Saturday morning, Anastasiia Galashina held a lead of 0.2 of a point over Yang Qian of China with one shot to go.
Air rifle at the highest level is a witheringly precise sport. The bull’s-eye is a mere half a millimeter across.
Women’s 10m Air Rifle Shooting › |
|
|---|---|
|
Anastasiia Galashina Olympic Athletes From Russia |
|
|
Nina Christen Switzerland |
|
Galashina fired her last shot and missed the center of the target, scoring just 8.9 points. It was the worst score of the entire eight-woman final. Yang’s last shot, at 9.8, was her lowest score of the competition as well, but it was easily enough to surpass Galashina and win the gold medal.
Galashina’s blunder was all the more remarkable because her previous shot had been worth 10.8, just a tenth of a point short of the maximum score.
“I got too nervous, held on too long,” Galashina said afterward. “My thoughts were not in the right place. I lost concentration.”
“But now I am happy,” she added. “I made a mistake. Nothing major. It will allow me to learn something; it’s a lesson for the future.”
Nina Christen of Switzerland won the bronze, and the American shooter Mary Tucker placed sixth.
The Olympics really start now. Oh boy, do they start now. A full 23 sports will be in action on Saturday in Tokyo. Eleven gold medals will be awarded.
The very first came around 11:30 a.m. Tokyo time (10:30 p.m. Eastern on Friday), when with Yang Qian of China won the women’s air rifle competition.
After the embarrassment of a 3-0 loss to Sweden in their opener, the U.S. women’s soccer team will try to bounce back against New Zealand at 8:30 p.m. in Tokyo (7:30 a.m. Eastern).
Many of the cyclists who just finished the Tour de France, including the winner, Tadej Pogacar of Slovenia, will contest the men’s road race. Expect some scenery. There’s plenty of climbing, and the riders will go partway up Mount Fuji.
In tennis, Naomi Osaka and Novak Djokovic will get their bids for Olympic gold underway.
Three-on-three basketball makes its Olympic debut, and the American women will play two games.
And in the Tokyo evening (morning U.S. time), swimming will begin, although there will only be heats, no finals.
Plus more gold medals in weight lifting, archery, judo, fencing and taekwondo. Buckle up!
When tennis players talk about how the Olympic tennis competition feels different than any other tournament, they are usually referring to representing their country — playing for national pride and a medal rather than simply prize money or points in the professional standings.
This year, there is that, but this is also shaping up to be one of the hottest and most uncomfortable tennis tournaments they will ever play in their lives. As play got underway Saturday morning temperatures were approaching 90 degrees in the shade. The combination of the sun, the humidity and the hardcourts made it feel far hotter than that on the courts.
Temperatures can be higher in Australia occasionally, but it is usually a dry heat. Cincinnati in August and the U.S. Open in late summer in New York have their oven-like days as well, but those days are shorter, and there are evening and night matches, too.
With the sun high throughout the afternoon there was little shade anywhere on any of the courts. There is a reason tennis tournaments in this part of the world take place in the fall.
Before the first hour was through, the heat was on the verge of claiming its first victim. After losing the first set, 6-0, Sara Errani of Italy struggled to answer the bell in the second set. She sat for several minutes in her chair during the changeover. Trainers measured her blood pressure and covered her in towels stuffed with ice. She put her face in front of a hose that blew cold air.
“It’s very hard,” said Iga Swiatek of Poland.
Swiatek loves to play in the cool air and under the gray skies of northern Europe. She won the French Open the one time it was played in October. For many players, their last competition was at Wimbledon in London, where the weather bears little resemblance to the cauldron of Tokyo. Swiatek said she traveled to Nagasaki to acclimate before coming to Tokyo, which helped, but there is only so much a player can do. Dealing with the heat becomes yet another mind game.
“You walk out, you know it’s not going to be fun,” Medvedev said after his straight sets win over Alexander Bublik of Kazakhstan. “You tell yourself you’re going to make it tough for him. You’re going to make him suffer.”
And yet there was one player who was in her element. It turns out Maria Sakkari of Greece, perhaps the fittest player in the game who loves few things more than spending several hours in the weight room, said she would not be bothered if it was even a few clicks hotter.
“I actually really like these conditions,” Sakkari said after her straight sets win over Anett Kontaveit of Estonia. Minutes after the victory, Sakkari looked like she had just walked out of an air-conditioned room. “We grow up playing in the heat in Greece. This is normal for me. Maybe a little more humid, but I felt really good out there.”
TOKYO — Past the baseball fields at Ojima Komatsugawa Park is a quiet edge where one of Japan’s leading Olympians got his start.
It is a place that sits quietly and unnoticed most days. Take a closer look: The stone steps leading toward the Kyunaka River are worn smooth by the grinding power of a thousand skateboards. The smooth, curved-steel hand rails beg to be ridden. A withered wooden quarter pipe is wedged under the bridge, next to a sleeping man. A sign warning that skateboarding is not allowed has been uprooted and tossed in the bushes.
Yuto Horigome grew up nearby, on the third floor of a 12-story apartment with his parents and two younger brothers. His father, Ryota Horigome, a Tokyo taxi driver, used to skateboard, too. When he married, he promised he would stop, because skateboarding in Japan was long seen as an activity for aimless renegades; it was time to get more serious with life.
But he took young Yuto to the park and handed him a skateboard. And on Sunday, Yuto Horigome, an unassuming 22-year-old from the east side of Tokyo, might become Japan’s first gold medalist — if he can beat the far more famous and rich Nyjah Huston of the United States in street skateboarding.
It is an event of imagination on rails, stairs and ramps. And the riverside edge of the park is where Horigome’s imagination flourished. On Friday, the same day that his father came to visit where it began, Yuto posted photographs to Instagram showing the two of them together at this very spot many years ago.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” Ryota said, 48 hours before the scheduled final of the Olympic contest. “But I have a heavy weight in my stomach.”
Kim Sang-woo contributed reporting.
TOKYO — After the final point, after all that she had been through, Hend Zaza, the youngest Olympian at the Tokyo Games, shed a tear.
Reaching the Olympics is no small feat, let alone at age 12 and from war-torn Syria, where finding a safe place to train with uninterrupted electricity was a challenge.
But Zaza’s Olympic appearance was short-lived. She lost on Saturday in straight sets (4-11, 9-11, 3-11, 5-11) to Liu Jia of Austria in the opening round of the women’s singles table tennis tournament. Afterward, Liu, 39, walked over to Zaza and offered a hug.
“I had maternal feelings,” said Liu, who has a 10-year-old daughter. “It was less about the sport side of this game and more the human side.”
At 12 years and 204 days, Zaza became the youngest table tennis player ever to compete in the Olympics, according to the Tokyo Games. She was the youngest Olympian in any sport since 1992, when Judit Kiss of Hungary, then 12, competed in swimming, and 11-year-old Carlos Font of Spain participated in rowing.
Although Zaza had hoped for a better showing, the loss capped a whirlwind trip. The night before her match, she was a flag bearer for Syria at the opening ceremony. A late night, plus the lingering six-hour jet lag, meant that she barely slept — not great preparation against Liu, who is making her sixth Olympic appearance.
“I was hoping for a winning match and for better play, but it’s a tough opponent so it’s a good lesson for me, especially with the first Olympics,” Zaza said through an interpreter. “I will work on it to get a better result next time, hopefully.”
Still, with her long hair bouncing as she did around the table, Zaza showed ability that impressed her seasoned opponent.
“I had to remind myself not to underestimate her,” Liu said. She called Zaza “a great talent” with good rhythm and instincts who simply needed more experience.
Zaza began playing table tennis at 5, following in the footsteps of an older brother. A local coach, Adham Aljamaan, spotted her and took her under his wing.
For most of Zaza’s life, Syria has been locked in a civil war. She practiced in a place with old tables, a concrete floor and frequent power outages, according to the International Table Tennis Federation’s publication.
At 11, Zaza qualified for the Tokyo Games by defeating 42-year-old Mariana Sahakian of Lebanon in the Western Asia Olympic qualification tournament in Jordan last year. The Chinese Olympic Committee invited Zaza to train in China, a table tennis powerhouse, once coronavirus pandemic restrictions were lifted, she said.
“For the last five years, I’ve been through many different experiences, especially with the war happening around the country, with the postponement, with the funding for the Olympics,” Zaza said. “It was very tough. But I had to fight for it.”
She added: “And this is my message to everyone who wishes to have the same situation: Fight for your dream, try hard regardless of the difficulties that you’re having, and you will reach your goal.”
The Olympic judo competition found itself mired in a political controversy even before Saturday’s start at the Nippon Budokan.
Having traveled all the way to Tokyo, Fethi Nourine, an Algerian judoka, withdrew from the event after learning that he most likely faced a bout against an Israeli opponent, Tohar Butbul, if the two men progressed to the second round.
Nourine’s withdrawal from the 73-kilogram category added another layer of controversy to an Olympics already facing a backdrop of coronavirus infections and local opposition. It also led to a furious and rapid response from judo’s governing body, which has grown weary of athletes who refuse to fight competitors from Israel.
Nourine and his coach, Amar Benikhlef, have already been temporarily suspended by the International Judo Federation, which is almost certain to impose further sanctions. The Algerian Olympic committee withdrew their Olympic credentials and was preparing to send them home.
Statements made by both men to Algerian news media about their withdrawal being linked to the prospect of facing an Israeli opponent was “in total opposition to the philosophy of the International Judo Federation,” the governing body said on its website. “The I.J.F. has a strict nondiscrimination policy, promoting solidarity as a key principle, reinforced by the values of judo.”
Nourine also withdrew from the judo world championship in 2019 after learning that he was scheduled to take on Butbul. That event also took place at the Nippon Budokan, the Tokyo venue that is host to this year’s Olympic competition.
Judo’s governing body has found itself having to take firm action amid anti-Israel sentiment expressed by some athletes in some of its most important tournaments. Iran, for example, received a four-year suspension in 2019 after refusing to allow its judokas to face Israelis. The Court of Arbitration for Sport overturned the ban earlier this year, saying that while Iran deserved to be punished, the blanket ban went too far.
Saeid Mollaei, now fighting for Mongolia after having fled Iran, said he was ordered to lose a semifinal bout at the 2019 world championships in order to avoid a potential final against the Israeli world champion Sagi Muki.
Tokyo 2020 can’t seem to catch a break.
As if a tenacious pandemic and Japan’s notoriously humid summer heat weren’t enough for the Olympics organizers to worry about, forecasts for an approaching typhoon are adding another layer of risk to the Games, which officially opened on Friday.
Early on Saturday, the U.S. team sent an alert that the rowing schedule was being adjusted because of an “inclement weather forecast.” Races originally scheduled for Monday have been moved to Sunday, and heats in the men’s and women’s eights, originally scheduled for Sunday, were moved to Saturday.
According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, a typhoon hit the Ogasawara Islands, an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean, south of Tokyo, late Friday. Forecasts show that the storm, which was upgraded to a typhoon from a tropical cyclone during the opening ceremony at the Olympic Stadium, is slowly moving north and could affect the Tokyo region on Tuesday.
The rowing events take place at Sea Forest Waterway in Tokyo Bay, not far from the city center.
At a news briefing on Saturday, Christophe Dubi, the sports director for the International Olympic Committee, said that having the forecasting abilities of Japan’s meteorologists “is a very big plus.”
“So we’re fortunate to have this technology available,” he said. Because of the advance warning, “we didn’t have to make the call on the day.”
No major schedule changes were planned other than those for rowing, Olympic organizers said on Saturday.
The effects of positive coronavirus tests among Olympic athletes began playing out on Saturday, hours after the opening ceremony, as a women’s beach volleyball team did not play because of an infection.
The Czech players Marketa Slukova and Barbora Hermannova were “unable to play,” according to the official scoring report, giving the win to their Japanese opponents. Slukova is one of at least four members of the Czech Olympic team who have tested positive.
Her result was announced on Thursday, and both she and her playing partner have been ruled out of the Games because of Covid-19 regulations.
Tokyo Olympic organizers announced 17 new positive tests on Saturday among people connected to the Games. At least 127 people with Olympic credentials, including 14 athletes, have tested positive.
You have probably heard it before: If California were its own country, it would rank fifth in an Olympic medal count.
When reached by phone in Tokyo, Dr. Bill Mallon of the International Society of Olympic Historians couldn’t say for sure whether that was true. But he did say the state would rank “almost certainly in the top 10.”
In terms of producing Olympians, he added, California’s universities are at the top of the list. As of about 2012, Stanford had sent 289 American athletes to the Games, the most of any school, Mallon said. It is followed by 277 from U.C.L.A., 251 from the University of Southern California and 212 from U.C. Berkeley.
In other words, even before skateboarding and surfing were added to the Games, the Golden State was a robust presence at the Olympics — a testament, Mallon said, to the state’s ideal weather for year-round training, its large population and the existence of a kind of snowball effect for athletes at top universities. (Athletic success begets more success.)
NBC and its sibling networks are covering a full slate of Olympic competitions on Saturday morning, in the early hours in the United States. All times are Eastern.
-
Softball: The U.S. team will try to keep its unbeaten streak going against Mexico, airing at 2:10 a.m. on NBCSN.
-
Soccer: Women’s group play continues, with Sweden facing Australia at 4:30 a.m. and the United States playing New Zealand at 7:30 a.m., on NBCSN.
-
Swimming: Action in the Olympic pool airs at 6 a.m. on USA. Coverage includes heats in the men’s and women’s 400-meter individual medley, and the women’s 100-meter butterfly.
-
Tennis: The first round of men’s and women’s singles and doubles airs live until 10 a.m. on the Olympic Channel.
-
Opening ceremony: NBC will rebroadcast the opening ceremony — which was capped off by the Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka lighting the cauldron — several times on Saturday morning.
TOKYO — Norie Kosaka knew better than to get her hopes up. A volunteer at the Games, she had been assigned to work at the opening ceremony on Friday night and assumed she would be one of the workers placed outside Olympic Stadium or tucked into some faraway corridor.
Instead, her supervisors informed her that she would be stationed inside the lower bowl of stands, just a few rows from the glittering, hourslong extravaganza. Her heart swelled.
“They told me, ‘You can watch a little bit,’” she said about her bosses. “So I was very happy.”
Kosaka’s job was to monitor one of the seating areas, and she took it seriously. But a few peeks would be OK, she figured. She smiled and pointed to her head.
“I want to put it in my memory,” she said.
Kosaka, 54, a manager at a bank in Tokyo, was one of the few locals who would even have the chance to do so.
Fans have been barred from the Olympics this year because of the pandemic. As a result, the 68,000-seat stadium was almost devoid of spectators on Friday night. An endless span of vacant seats formed a bleak backdrop to the multicolor spectacle unfolding on the infield in front of her.
The crowd that had access was small and exclusive: sponsors and sports officials, dignitaries and journalists, no party representing the populist spirit of fandom the Olympic Games purport to represent.
“I’m lucky,” Kosaka said. “I wish more people could see this.”
Eighty-five years after basketball’s debut in the Olympics, at the 1936 Berlin Games, a twist on the sport makes its Olympic debut in Tokyo. Three-on-three basketball, or 3×3 as the sport’s world governing body refers to it, promises a faster version than the traditional form.
What is three-on-three basketball?
Three on three is basketball reimagined for the TikTok generation, with fast-paced choreography and a hip-hop soundtrack. “If you have a short attention span, this is your sport,” said Kara Lawson, the coach of the U.S. women’s team.
The half-court game is played outdoors with a 12-second shot clock, no breaks and four-player rosters. The game ends after 10 minutes or when a team reaches 21 points, whichever comes first. Baskets scored outside the arc are worth two points; buckets inside it are worth one. The play is physical and fouls are rarely called.
“It’s like the X Games,” said U.S. guard Kelsey Plum. “There’s music going on, there’s a commentator making jokes about people’s play, about people getting crossed over, about someone shooting in someone’s face, saying someone is quicker than a Kardashian marriage.” (That omnipresent play-by-play announcer, Kyle Montgomery, peppers his commentary with Meek Mill and Drake lyrics and one liners like: “She’s all business like the front of the plane.”)
Why was 3×3 created?
FIBA decided to experiment with an alternative form of the sport at the 2010 Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, where the first official three-on-three game was played. To expose more of the world to basketball, FIBA wanted to promote a game with a street ball vibe and small rosters.
The Olympics, in its quest to be cutting-edge, quickly added three-on-three basketball to its lineup, joining skateboarding, surfing, karate and climbing as newcomers to the Tokyo Games.
Why aren’t the U.S. men in Tokyo?
The United States, birthplace of basketball, has only one team in Tokyo. The men, winner of 15 of 19 men’s gold medals in the traditional five-on-five game, did not qualify. The squad was made up of former college players.
Are the U.S. women favored to win gold?
Yes, behind its roster of young W.N.B.A. standouts — Plum of the Las Vegas Aces, Chicago Sky center Stefanie Dolson, Dallas Wings guard Allisha Gray and Las Vegas guard Jackie Young. Earlier this week, Young replaced Katie Lou Samuelson, who tested positive for the coronavirus while training with the team in Las Vegas.
Given there’s no timeouts or coaches on the bench, the pressure falls on the players to adjust on the fly. “You have to be more prepared,” said Lawson, who has been involved with the three-on-three team the past five years. “You have to be sure the players are equipped to coach themselves because I can’t save them and call a timeout and say you need to change this.”
Who can stop the women?
Though the Americans are considered the most talented squad in the eight-team women’s event, they have limited experience playing together against veteran teams such as France, China and Russia. Even so, there’s a sense that anything can happen given the game is much more unpredictable than five on five.
Lawson said the short length of each game raises the stakes.
“You don’t have time in three on three,’’ she said. “If you’re down at the end of the first quarter you’re out of the tournament.”
The American men will not win the 3×3 gold medal, but Serbia or Latvia might. It’s also significant that the women’s tournament includes Mongolia, which has excelled in individual sports such as wrestling, boxing and judo in previous Olympics, but not team sports. This will be the first time the country has entered a team sport in the Summer Games. Mongolia’s Khulan Onolbaatar became her country’s first female flag-bearer.
“Mongolia is basketball crazy. I had no idea,” said Lawson, who took a three-on-three team there in 2019. “I’ve been to countries over the last five years that I would never guess I would go to for basketball.”
from WordPress https://ift.tt/3iIGtm7
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment