In this morning’s General Audience, Pope Francis recalled that the 2020 Tokyo Paralympic Games opened yesterday, Tuesday, August 24, 2021, so he took advantage to greet the athletes and to thank them “because you give everyone a testimony of hope and courage. They show how the commitment to sport helps to overcome seemingly insurmountable difficulties.”

Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games

As the Games’ website states, on September 7, 2013, the 125^th General Assembly of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) designated Tokyo as the venue of the Olympic and Paralympic Games, which returned to the Japanese capital after 57 years. On that occasion, 378 disabled athletes, from 21 countries, competed in nine sports.

As a consequence of the global health crisis caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus, Japan’s government was obliged to postpone the games for a year. So, the 2020 Paralympic event is being held from August 24 to September 5, 2021, gathering 4,400 athletes with physical, intellectual, and visual disabilities or cerebral paralysis, from at least 160 countries.

Being held over 12 days of competition are 539 medal events: 272 masculine, 227 feminine and 40 mixed. Some of the sports that are part of the competition include: athletics, basketball in wheelchairs, boccia, cycling, fencing in wheelchairs, football-5, goalball, judo, weightlifting and horse riding, swimming, canoeing, rowing, rugby in wheelchairs, table tennis, tennis in wheelchairs, archery and Olympic shooting, triathlon and seated volleyball plus the premier of badminton and taekwondo.

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