Today in a nutshell: the Roman god Janus of Tokyo briefings, looking backwards, looking forwards.
Next week’s key moments: your daily Tokyo briefings will resume on Monday, the Paralympics opening ceremony is on Tuesday 24 August at 8pm in Tokyo, and the sport begins the following day with track cycling, swimming, goalball, table tennis, wheelchair basketball, wheelchair fencing and wheelchair rugby among the events that start straight away.
It’s been just over a week since the Tokyo Olympics finished, and it is just over a week until the Tokyo Paralympics begin. How are we all feeling? Thanks for sticking with these emails.
I’ve been jokingly calling this the intercalated email because it isn’t quite the Olympics and it isn’t quite the Paralympics. In 1906 they got over-excited and following 1896, 1900 and 1904 decided to hold another Olympics in Athens in 1906. The aim then was to hold the Games every two years – once internationally, then back to Athens, then internationally, then back to Athens and so on. Clearly impractical, and those 1906 Games in Athens have been shoved aside in Olympics history, and named the “Intercalated Games”. Like this email.
But I wanted to drop in to your inbox to remind you that we’ll be back next week when the Paralympics starts. At Rio, in 2016, Team GB’s 15-year-old Ellie Robinson set a world record in the 50m butterfly and said “It’s going to be weird to go back to school as a Paralympic champion.”
In the cycling in Rio, Kadeena Cox became the first British Paralympian to win medals in two sports in the same Games since 1988. Visually impaired Cuban sprinter Omara Durand added 100m, 200m and 400m gold to the two golds she’d won in London in 2012. Jessica Gallagher became the first Australian Paralympian to win medals at the both the Summer Paralympics and Winter Paralympics by winning a bronze medal in cycling.
Last year swimmer McKenzie Coan was training in a tethered resistance pool at home in Clarkesville, Georgia in the US. She won three golds at Rio for the US, and has said that finally heading for the delayed 2020 Paralympics is “sending a message of positivity and optimism to the world that we’ve made it this far and we will keep going until things get better.”
And the Paralympics are going to be bigger than ever before. Badminton and taekwondo replace sailing and 7-a-side football, but overall there will be 540 events in 22 sports. Like the Olympics, all fans will be barred because of the coronavirus pandemic, organisers confirmed on Monday.
While looking ahead to the Paralympics, I’ve also still been thinking about how enjoyable the Olympics were. I’ve thought especially about how lovely it was to share the experience some of the athletes returning home and being greeted by their families. For some it was the joy of seeing their children again. For others, given the introduction of sports like skateboarding into the Games, it was the children who were coming home. With the medals.
And I especially keep thinking about that handover segment in the Olympic closing ceremony looking ahead to Paris 2024, and featuring French medal winners who had already left Japan and so were able to celebrate their success surrounded by fans, when in Tokyo there was an empty stadium.
In his closing speech at the Olympics IOC president Thomas Bach praised Japan because nobody before had ever tried to put on a postponed Games. And they now face the task again with a postponed Paralympics. I’m sure it is going to shine.
Things you might have missed …
What will you get in the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics briefing?
Pretty much exactly what you got for the Olympics. At the end of each day’s action in Japan I’ll be in your inbox, summing up the day’s events for you in a nutshell, sorting the joy from the despair, explaining what mattered, and highlighting the best of our journalism from Tokyo.
I’ll also be helping you plan what you need to pay attention to the following day, with a detailed guide to the events schedule, and pointers for the medal hopes and most interesting stories.
And I’ll be explaining how the different classifications work in each sport. There’s a 41 page document from the organisers about that – and I’ve read it so that you don’t have to.
Obviously I’ll be keeping a close eye on the Paralympians from the UK, US and Australia, as that is where we have our main Guardian offices, but it will be a truly international briefing. I hope you’ll join me for what is sure to be an incredible couple of weeks of glory and despair, and every human emotion in between. I’ll see you on Monday 👍