With just four months left to the commencement of the Olympic Games, the flame for the Tokyo 2020 has arrived in Japan amid the fear of coronavirus pandemic.
The Olympic flame was carried from Greece in a chartered aircraft--the Tokyo 2020 Go--to the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force base in Matsushima, Miyagi Prefecture on Friday.
The ceremony to celebrate the arrival of Olympic flame will be held later in the day. However, the performances by the local stundens have been canceled due to deadly COVID-19.
The flame will also be put to display in three northern prefectures which were hit by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami prior to the commencement of the torch relay on March 26 from J-Village at Fukushima, Xinhua reported.
Earlier on Friday, retired Japanenese judo athlete Kaori Yamaguchi, who is also a member of her country's Olympic Committee executive board, has lashed out at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for putting athletes at risk instead of opting for the postponement of the Tokyo Games 2020.
Yamaguchi's comments came a day after IOC chief Thomas Bach had stated that it is too early to decide the fate of the Tokyo Games amid the ongoing coronavirus fear.
On March 12, the flame for the Tokyo Olympics 2020 was lit in a torch lighting ceremony held in ancient Olympia in Greece behind closed doors after the country registered its first death from coronavirus.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics is slated to place from July 24 to August 9. However, the global spread of coronavirus has cast doubt over whether the quadrennial sporting event will take place as scheduled.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently labeled the outbreak of coronavirus (COVD-19) a 'pandemic.' The virus outbreak, which was first reported in December 2019 from Wuhan city of China, has so far claimed the lives of more than 10,000 people and has affected more than 2,40,000 persons globally.
