Enlarge / Flag bearers Yui Susaki and Rui Hachimura of Group Japan lead their crew out through the Opening Ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Video games at Olympic Stadium on July 23, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. (credit score: Matthias Hangst | Getty Photos)
Ten days earlier than the opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics, Kara Lawson, the coach of america ladies’s 3×3 basketball crew, gave a press convention. The game is new to the Olympics this yr, and Lawson, a former WNBA participant and coach at Duke College, advised the dozen or so reporters taking part on-line what she appreciated about it—the sport is faster-paced, Lawson mentioned, and extra unpredictable than the five-on-five model. However throughout a worldwide pandemic, Lawson added, the well being of her gamers was her primary precedence. “We’re clearly examined each day. I’m truly quarantined in my room proper now,” Lawson mentioned. “We’re masked on a regular basis … a constructive check at this juncture is tough for any crew on the point of go to Tokyo. We’re centered on doing our half, not simply so we will have competitors, however we positively really feel a accountability to fellow human beings to be good about eliminating transmission of the illness worldwide.”
Lower than every week later, certainly one of Lawson’s gamers—Katie Lou Samuelson, an influence ahead for the Seattle Storm—introduced on Instagram that she had examined constructive for Covid-19 and wouldn’t have the ability to go to Tokyo. Quick-paced, perhaps, however not precisely unpredictable. Because the 2020 Tokyo Video games get underway, Samuelson is certainly one of 91 individuals both in Tokyo for the Olympics or who have been hoping to go who’ve examined constructive for the illness, together with US tennis participant Coco Gauf, a Czech seashore volleyball participant, two South African soccer gamers, and so forth.
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