Covid: between stops and postponements, sport risks chaos

From Great Britain to Italy, from the United States to Australia, sport is also hit by the new wave of infections also brought by the Omicron variant and daily deals with new cases of positivity, postponements of meetings and stops at championships in many disciplines different.

    In football, if in Italy it has decided to stop the Serie B championship, which has given up the rounds scheduled for 26 and 29 December to resume directly in mid-January, the Premier League is holding on but accumulating new postponements day after day, so far they are about fifteen, with technicians and players rather critical on the management of what is becoming an emergency. In a week from 20 to 26/12, over 15 thousand swabs were made, with 103 positivity, a record. Also in Great Britain, Wales have decided that all sporting events will now take place behind closed doors, as well as in Germany, where the Bundesliga will only resume playing on 7 January, just after Serie A. In Scotland, the winter break of three weeks was brought forward to today instead of January 3.

    Tennis is almost at a standstill, waiting for the start of the new season in Australia, but the pandemic puts at risk what is the most anticipated event of January, the Australian Open, starting on the 17th. Three top players - Rafa Nadal , Denis Shapovalov and, today Andrey Rublev - have announced that they are positive and their holdings could be called into question. "Now I have to recover and I will only go to Melbourne when it is safe for everyone," the Russian said on Twitter. Serbian number one in the world Novak Djokovic, who does not declare whether he is vaccinated or not, has to announce by the end of the year whether he will participate in the first major in Melbourne, but his entourage has already said that he will not make the ATP Cup (1-9 January ), a tournament for Nations that risks starting lame.

    Alpine skiing is also not spared: the American Mikaela Shiffrin, leader of the World Cup, announced on her social networks that she had tested positive. He will certainly miss the races in Lienz (Austria) tomorrow and Wednesday, which will also be held behind closed doors. The US champion joins the Swiss Lara Gut-Behrami, the New Zealander Alice Robinson and the Austrian Katharina Liensberger on the list of positives.

    Overseas, the NBA championship holds its course in the storm, but as many as 27 out of 30 teams have had one or more infections, with the Atlanta Hawks left without eleven players and the Boston Celtics nine.

It is a race to put players from the reserve league under contract for a few days to replace the absent ones, but equally every day some matches are missed.

The hockey championship should resume tomorrow after stopping for almost a week due to the infections.

The matches postponed so far are 67 and it seems that they will be recovered during the Beijing Winter Olympics, given that the Nhl professors have decided to give up.