Two days before the official opening ceremony, the sporting events for the Tokyo Olympics kicked off Wednesday in Fukushima at 9 a.m. in Japan, with the softball match, the women's version of baseball, between Japan and Australia.
The organizers of the Tokyo Olympics, postponed for a year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, wanted to symbolically mark the occasion by starting their Games on Wednesday in Fukushima, in an area ravaged by the nuclear accident and the powerful earthquake of March 2011. This first day of competition gives pride of place to women's events with three softball matches, followed by the first six matches of the women's football tournament.
A bear seen inside the stadium
With the resurgence of contamination due to Covid-19, these "Reconstruction Games" will however be played behind closed doors. It is therefore in a Fukushima stadium with only the teams, staffs, officials and media that the Japanese softball players, crowned Olympic champions in 2008 for the discipline's last appearance at the Olympics, launched the tournament and the Olympics against Australia. An unexpected spectator, however, managed to enter the enclosure: a bear was seen on the site on the night of Tuesday to Wednesday and again Wednesday morning. The entire contingent of Olympic guards assigned to the site spent the night looking for the animal. They even sounded music and threw firecrackers in an attempt to find him.
The softball match was nonetheless able to go off without a hitch on Wednesday morning.
Japan won after the match, won 8-1.
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.
An Olympic discipline from 1996 to 2008, softball is one of the five additional sports of these Olympic Games proposed by the Organizing Committee and approved by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), along with karate, climbing, surfing and skateboard.
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.