Over 240 athletes are on Russia’s Paralympic team for Tokyo games — official

TOKYO, July 22./TASS/. As many as 241 Russian athletes will perform at the Paralympic Games in Tokyo, acting president of the Russian Paralympic Committee, Pavel Rozhkov, told TASS on Thursday. "There are 430 people in the team, including 241 athletes — 129 male athletes and 112 female. The team includes 90 merited sports masters and 94 international masters of sports. Overall, representatives from 50 Russian regions of the Russian Federation will take part in the games. The majority of athletes are from Moscow," Rozhkov said. "Russian Paralympic athletes will take part in 19 kinds of sports out of 22 on the program of the games. We will for the first time participate in badminton, boccia, rowing, canoeing, triathlon, taekwondo as well as women’s competitions in goalball and sitting volleyball," Rozhkov added. According to the acting president of the Russian Paralympic Committee, the traditional seeing-off of the athletes will be online due to the anti-coronavirus precautions taken by the Organizing Committee. "According to the notification, members of the delegations staying in Moscow 14 days before the trip to Japan will have to minimize contacts within the last three days of their stay in Russia and take daily coronavirus tests," Rozhkov said. "In order to meet the requirements from the Organizing Committee [of the Olympic Games] in Tokyo, we decided to restrict the movements of the athletes from July 15 and hold the traditional seeing-off of the national team and part of the organizational events online," Rozhkov added. The 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Japan’s capital of Tokyo are being held this year between July 23 and August 8. In March 2020, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) decided to postpone the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Japan for one year due to the spread of COVID-19. The Paralympic Games will take place between August 24 and September 5. Under the decision of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, Russian athletes are stripped of the possibility to perform under the national flag and state emblem at world championships, Olympic and Paralympic games until December 16, 2022. Read more