Osaka lights flame as Japan’s COVID-hit Games open

Japan’s global superstar Naomi Osaka on Friday lit the Olympic cauldron to mark the start of Tokyo 2020, in an opening ceremony shorn of glitz and overshadowed by a pandemic but defined by hope, tradition and gestures of diversity.

Postponed by a year due to the coronavirus, the Games are being held without spectators in a city under a COVID-induced state of emergency, as many other parts of the globe also still struggle with a resurgence of cases.

Athletes, the vast majority wearing masks, paraded through an eerily silent National Stadium where flagbearers for the first time were both men and women and the Canadian delegation marched with rainbow badges on their uniforms in support of the LGBTQ+ community.

In its journey through the stadium, the torch was passed from Olympic champions to baseball legends – one born in Taiwan – a doctor and a nurse, a Paralympian, and children from parts of Japan hit badly by the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011.

0

1