The Japan Women's Open, one of the leading Asian tennis tournaments, has been canceled for the first time due to the outbreak of the new Corona virus, organizers said Tuesday.
The cancellation of one of the premiere tournaments scheduled for November and Naomi Osaka won last year’s title, a week after the cancellation of all tennis matches in China for 2020.
The "Pan Pacific" session will stop for the first time since 1984, leaving the South Korean Open in October as the only women among the calendar for the year devastated by "Covid-19".
This is a fresh blow to hosting sports in Japan, after the postponement of the Summer Olympics from 2020 to the summer of 2021.
"We were trying to find ways (to keep the tournament), like playing without an audience or limiting the number of spectators," the organizers said in a statement.
They added, "But we reached a difficult conclusion that we had to cancel the course due to the difficulty of ensuring its safety."
The session was postponed from September to November, in light of the organizers' desire to preserve the hope of holding it.