Dylan Bettencourt
A beautiful opening ceremony got the 2020 Tokyo Olympics underway in spectacular fashion as China won the very first gold medal.
The women’s 10m air rifle shooting saw the first gold medal up for grabs. Russian shooter Anastasiia Galashina had a 0.2-point lead over China’s Yang Qian going into their final shot. A poor final shot from the Russian gave China the first gold medal of the games.
There was controversy on the first day when an Algerian judoka was suspended after he withdrew from his encounter to avoid coming up against an Israeli opponent.
Algerian Fethi Nourine withdrew from the event after he was told he had a matchup against Tohar Butbul from Israel. The same incident occurred back in 2019 when the two fighters were due to face each other at the judo world championship.
Tokyo 2020 suffered another major blow as a typhoon forecast hampered the rowing schedule. All races scheduled for Monday have been moved to Sunday with the men’s and women’s eights moved to Saturday from Sunday.
Forecasts showed that a storm was on the horizon but that quickly turned into a typhoon warning likely to affect the Tokyo region on Tuesday.
The youngest athlete at the Olympics lost in her table tennis encounter, cutting her Olympic dream short. Twelve-year-old Hend Zaza from Syria lost in straight sets to Liu Jia of Austria in the opening round of the women’s singles table tennis.
She became the youngest ever athlete to compete in the table tennis category and the youngest Olympian since 1992. To date, the youngest athlete at the Olympics was Carlos Font who participated in the rowing event at 11-years-old.
Zimbabwean Peter Purcell-Gilpin was the only African out of nine to earn automatic qualification for the next round of the men’s single sculls. The other eight African athletes will compete in Saturday semifinal E/F rounds.
Image source: @People
