Japanese Olympian To Receive Flame In Athens


Japanese Olympian to receive flame in Athens

A Japanese Olympian who lives in Greece will receive the Olympic flame in a scaled-down ceremony in Athens because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The ceremony will be held at the Panathenaic Stadium on Thursday.

The Tokyo Games organizing committee announced on Wednesday that 43-year-old Olympic swimmer Naoko Imoto will accept the flame on behalf of the host city.

She represented Japan in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and now works for refugees as an educational specialist at UNICEF Greece in Athens.

A delegation from Tokyo, headed by the organizing committee chairman Yoshiro Mori, had been scheduled to receive the Olympian flame from the Greek side.

The ceremony will instead feature video messages from Mori and two Japanese Olympic gold medalists, men's judoka Tadahiro Nomura and women's wrestler Saori Yoshida.

The event had been expected to last over one hour, but will be shortened to 25 minutes.

The Olympic flame will be flown to Higashimatsushima City in Miyagi Prefecture, northeastern Japan, on a charter flight. It will first be displayed in three prefectures that were severely affected by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster.