(TOKYO) — There will be no foreign fans at the Tokyo Olympics this summer after Japan decided to not allow overseas’s spectators entry into the country, according to a press release from Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee.
The decision was announced on Saturday following a virtual meeting between the International Olympic Committee, International Paralympic Committee, Tokyo Metropolitan Government, the Organising Committee Tokyo 2020, and the government of Japan. The Japanese parties cited the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic across the world, the emergence of new variants of the virus, and restricted international travel as the reasoning.
“In order to give clarity to ticket holders living overseas and to enable them to adjust their travel plans at this stage, the parties on the Japanese side have come to the conclusion that they will not be able to enter into Japan at the time of the Olympic and Paralympic Games,” the Tokyo 2020 Organizing Committee said in a statement.
The IOC and IPC respected and accepted this conclusion during Saturday’s meeting.
Spectators who purchased tickets will be refunded. Ticketholders will be informed soon about getting the refund.
(NEW YORK) — After a turbulent week, the weather pattern this weekend is looking much quieter across the country.
However, a new storm is beginning to move through the Western U.S. and it will bring mountain snow and some rain to the major western cities.
Any rain across most of the Western U.S., and especially in Southern California, is very much welcomed at the moment but the rain looks like it might just miss Los Angeles where they have received less than half the average of their wet season rainfall to date.
Some mountain snow could also make for treacherous travel, especially in the mountains passes in the Sierra.
By Monday, some of this activity will move into the Central U.S. and become the next organized system that will bring impactful weather to the eastern half of the nation.
After receiving their fourth largest snowstorm on record earlier this week, it appears another round of snow is headed for the Denver metro area by Monday.
Additionally, the developing storm will spark the next round of severe weather with strong storms developing later Monday across Oklahoma and Texas. The risk includes the threat of damaging winds.
By Tuesday and Wednesday, the threat for rain and strong storms will move further south and east.
There will likely be another severe weather threat across portions of the Gulf states in this time frame.
The result of this pattern is, locally, over a foot of snow in some of the northern Rockies and Cascades through Monday.
Several inches of snow will be possible in the urban corridor of Colorado as well on Monday and, locally, 2 to 3 inches of rain is possible through Monday in parts of the central Plains and Midwest.
The other big news is that it is officially spring this morning and spring-like temperatures will surge into the Midwest and Northeast over the next few days.
Temperatures will likely be 10 to 15 degrees above average in the coming days across this region.
(NEW YORK) — NCAA officials apologized for “dropping the ball” after providing women’s basketball players with training facilities inferior to men’s during the Division 1 tournaments.
“We fell short this year in what we’ve been doing to prepare in the last 60 days for 64 for teams to be here in San Antonio, and we acknowledge that,” Lynn Holzman, the NCAA’s vice president of women’s basketball, said during a press briefing Friday, after images and video surfaced on social media showing the stark differences between the women’s and men’s weight room facilities in Texas and Indiana, respectively.
The apology comes after University of Oregon forward Sedona Prince posted a video Thursday night of the women’s tournament weight room, which consisted of a single set of dumbbells. The video then showed what she said was the men’s tournament weight room, which was stocked with rows of weights and training equipment.
“If you’re not upset about this problem, then you are a part of it,” Prince said.
Golden State Warriors’ Stephen Curry retweeted the viral video, saying, “Come on now!”
Ali Kershner, a sports performance coach at Stanford University, also posted images to Instagram Thursday contrasting the women’s sparse weight room to the men’s more lavish one in Indianapolis.
“This needs to be addressed. These women want and deserve to be given the same opportunities,” Kershner said. “In a year defined by a fight for equality this is a chance to have a conversation and get better.”
In an initial statement Thursday evening, Holzman said limited space in the tournament bubble was a factor in the amenities available.
On Friday, Holzman said the NCAA was “actively working” on addressing the women’s facilities, promising that improvements would be in place by Saturday morning.
Dan Gavitt, senior vice president of basketball for the NCAA, took the blame for the weight room controversy and said it will be fixed “as soon as possible.”
“I apologize to women’s basketball student-athletes, to the coaches, Women’s Basketball Committee for dropping the ball, frankly, on the weight room issue in San Antonio,” Gavitt said during Friday’s press briefing.
Holzman said the NCAA became aware of the training facility concerns through social media on Thursday. Within a few hours, the NCAA held a conference call with coaches and administrators to solicit feedback.
“We’re trying to do the right thing,” Holzman said.
The weight room isn’t the only area the NCAA is addressing. Athletes have also voiced concerns about the quality of food at the women’s tournament while athletes are quarantining. Holzman said Friday that they have been working to provide athletes with more options that can be delivered to the controlled environment.
The weight room disparity has touched on larger issues of inequality in women’s college basketball.
“The women’s basketball tournament ought to be an NCAA flagship event, yet it continues to be treated as some kind of cheap subsidized junior varsity by the book-cooking crooks,” Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins wrote in a column Friday. “All these women ever do is raise their arc of performance, command steadily increasing viewership and graduate at a sky-high rate of 93%. For which they get petty insults and cheap treatment.”
In a video statement Friday in response to Prince’s video, tennis trailblazer Billie Jean King criticized the NCAA’s use of “Final Four” on social media to only highlight the men’s tournament.
“We’re always supposed to be so happy with just anything, the crumbs, whatever — we’re not happy anymore,” King said. “We want equity. We want equality. We want the same.”
Equal time, equal access, equal facilities, equal treatment.
Mike Marsland/WireImage(LONDON) — While many of us have been battling the “quarantine 15,” Luke Evans has gone the other way. The Beauty and the Beast actor just posted to Instagram a “before and after” shot to show off his workout gains.
For the record, even his “before” was enviable, but his “after” has him showing off some serious action movie hero muscles.
“8 months of work but I got there. June 2020 – February 2021,” the actor captioned the side-by-side “Flashback Friday” pics. “I won’t bother putting statistics as the judges will only judge,” he added, with a reminder that age is just a number: “#Nearly42”.
Justin Setterfield/Getty ImagesBY: LEIGHTON SCHNEIDER, ABC NEWS
