Two days before the official opening ceremony, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games started on Wednesday in Fukushima at 9 a.m. local time (2 a.m. in France), with the softball match, the women's version of baseball, between Japan and Australia. .
To discover
The full program of the Olympic Games
The organizers of the 2020 Olympics, postponed for a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, wanted to symbolically mark the occasion, by starting their Games in Fukushima, in an area ravaged by the nuclear accident of March 2011, after a powerful earthquake of magnitude 9.0 and a gigantic tsunami which caused the fusion of the cores of three reactors of the plant.
Closed stadium
This first day of competition gives pride of place to women's events with three softball matches, followed by the first six matches of the women's football tournament.
With the resurgence of contaminations due to Covid-19, these “
Reconstruction Games
” will however be played behind closed doors.
It is therefore in a stadium with only teams, staffs, officials and media that the Japanese, crowned Olympic champions in 2008 for the last appearance of the discipline at the Olympics, launched the tournament and the Olympics against the Australia.
Music and firecrackers to scare away the bear before the trials
An unexpected spectator, however, managed to enter the enclosure: a bear was seen on the site on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday and again Wednesday morning.
According to Japanese media, the animal is an Asian black bear and according to the daily Sports Hochi, the entire contingent of Olympic guards assigned to the site spent the night looking for the animal.
They even sounded music and threw firecrackers in an attempt to find him.
These animals often venture out of woods or forests in Japan and set off frantic hunts when they enter towns, where they sometimes prey on inhabitants. “
A guard found a bear inside Azuma Sports Park early in the morning yesterday. We also received similar information this morning,
”said a spokesman for the Fukushima police. "
We could not find or capture the bear and even though there are no spectators at the stadium, we are on alert and looking for the bear around the site,
" he added.
Last month, a brown bear was shot dead in Sapporo after injuring four people and wreaking havoc in this northern Japanese city where the Olympic marathon is to take place. However, the softball game went off without a hitch on Wednesday morning. Japan won after the match, won 8-1. Present for the first time on the Olympic program in 1996 in Atlanta, in one of the cradles of the discipline with Japan, softball has written its history with the Games in extremely fine lines, even in dotted lines.
An Olympic discipline from 1996 to 2008, softball is one of the five additional sports of these Olympics, proposed by the organizing committee and approved by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), along with karate, climbing, surfing and skateboarding. Moreover, the discipline will not be celebrating in Paris in three years, but still hopes to be part of the list of the lucky ones elected in Los Angeles in 2028, in the country of softball and baseball.
