TOKYO 2020: PARALYMPICS

When the Paralympics opened with a subdued ceremony on 24 August 2021, many thousands of people in the Olympic and Paralympic movement around the world breathed a big sigh of relief. During the Olympics, amid sharply rising COVID cases in Tokyo and the rest of Japan, there were even whispers that it might be cancelled. The status of the Paralympics has been precarious before, many times – and this certainly includes the last outing in Rio – but, even so, it would have been a terrible fate.

Once again, no spectators were permitted into the spectacular Yumenoshima Park venue, or any others – a gigantic waste of one of the finest major venues the sport has ever seen built. Everyone said that the notoriously hot and sticky conditions for the Olympics would calm down for the Paralympics, held after the traditional mid-August change in the weather. This was not to be, and at times the archers had to deal with even hotter and more humid conditions, as well as the wind, thunderstorms and torrential rain that coastal