Tokyo (AFP)

It is around 9 a.m. on Wednesday in Fukushima (2 a.m. Paris time), in the imposing Azuma Stadium with 30,000 seats, without a single spectator, that softball, a women's version of baseball, will give the sporting kick-off of the Tokyo Olympics, two days before the opening ceremony of the 2010 Olympics.

The organizers of the Olympics-2020, 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.

However, with the resurgence of contamination due to Covid-19, these “Reconstruction Games” will be played behind closed doors.

It will therefore be in a stadium with only the teams, staffs, officials and media that the Japanese, crowned Olympic champions in 2008 for the discipline's last appearance at the Olympics, will launch the tournament and the Olympics against Australia.

Present on the Olympic program for the first time 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.

- Beijing's affront -

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).

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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.

The Americans, crowned in 1996, 2000 and 2004 but beaten in the final of the 2008 Olympics by the Japanese, will want to wash away the Beijing insult and regain the top of the Olympic podium.

They will play the second match of the day from 12 noon against the Italians.

The six qualified teams (Japan, United States, Australia, Italy, Mexico and Canada) each play five matches.

The first two at the end of this group stage will meet in the final for the gold medal on Tuesday, the third and fourth will compete for bronze.

The day after the softball final, the baseball tournament will begin without the Cubans, mounted on each of the five Olympic podiums (gold in 1992, 1996, 2004, silver in 2000 and 2008) but who did not qualify for this edition.

© 2021 AFP