Categories
football Slides Sports News

TOKYO 2020 OPENING CEREMONY DIRECTOR SACKED ONE DAY BEFORE EVENT

Friday’s opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics has been plunged into further chaos following the dismissal of its show director.

Tokyo 2020 president Seiko Hashimoto confirmed to media that Kantaro Kobayashi has been sacked on the eve of the event due to alleged anti-Semitic jokes he made during a comedy routine in 1998.

The show’s composer Keigo Oyamada was forced to resign earlier this week after footage emerged of interviews in which he admitted bullying disabled children during his schooldays.

And its executive creative director Hiroshi Sasaki stepped down in March following criticism of his suggestion that plus-size model Naomi Watanabe dress up as a pig during the ceremony.

No fans and fewer than 1,000 VIPs will be present in the 68,000 capacity Tokyo Olympic Stadium, with a string of heads of major corporations such as Toyota and Panasonic announcing publicly that they would withdraw, citing concerns over the public’s perception of the Games.

Japanese media have reported that Emperor Naruhito will be present at the ceremony, but will pointedly refrain from using the word “celebrate”.

Only around 30 of more than 200 Team GB athletes who are currently in Tokyo are expected to march at the ceremony, with many citing coronavirus concerns.

Categories
Sports News

Russia shouldn’t be allowed to the olympics games says former russia doping agent

No Russian athletes should be allowed to take part in the postponed Tokyo Olympics next year, says former doping mastermind turned whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov.

The architect of the country’s infamous state-sponsored doping scandal told BBC Sport the country had not changed despite being banned from all major sporting events for four years in December for manipulating laboratory data.

The World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) has ruled that Russian athletes who prove they are clean will be able to compete in Japan under a neutral flag.

In his first broadcast interview since the decision, Rodchenkov, the former head of Moscow’s anti-doping laboratory, said: “It should be an absolute blanket ban without any excuses or admissions of athletes.

“The same personnel who were smuggling and swapping samples during Sochi [the 2014 Winter Games], they were falsifying all documentation.

“It was a progression in falsifying, day by day, of this data – an incredible fraud of unspeakable proportion. It shows the country learns absolutely nothing.”

Russia’s Anti-Doping Agency (Rusada) was declared non-compliant for doctoring laboratory data handed over to investigators last year.

It had to provide the information to Wada as a condition of its controversial reinstatement in 2018 after a three-year suspension for a cheating conspiracy across the “vast majority” of Olympic sports.

Russia has repeatedly denied the allegations, and claimed the unprecedented four-year sanction is excessive, unfair and politically motivated.

Its appeal against a punishment that rules it out of both the Tokyo Games and the 2022 football World Cup will be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in November.

Speaking via Zoom from an undisclosed location in the US where he has been in hiding for the past five years, and shrouded in a scarf, sunglasses and hat to keep his changed identity secret, Rodchenkov believes he is now “unrecognisable”, having also changed his behaviour and gestures.