The Tokyo 2020 Paralympic’s Organizers on Monday banned Spectators from attending the games due to the current covid-19 state in Japan.

This is after Japans Covid-19 state kept increasing in the recent past and the government is set to extend its state of emergency in regions including Tokyo to the middle of September as well as adding several other regions.

The current state of emergency is due to expire on Aug. 31, but a continuing surge in coronavirus cases has spurred calls to extend it.

According to the organizers organisers in a joint statement with local and national government and the International Paralympic Committee banning the spectators is among the measures that will see the participants protected from the spread of Corona Virus during the Paralympics.

“More stringent measures will be taken for competitions to be held in these prefectures, including no spectators,” Said the Organizers.

The Tokyo 2020 Paralympics are set to start on 24th August to 5th September 2021.

The games together with the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were postponed to 2021 in March 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The events are still being branded as Tokyo 2020 for marketing purposes. They will mark the second Summer Paralympics to be hosted by Tokyo since the 1964 Games, and the third Paralympics held in Japan overall since the 1998 Winter Paralympics.

As part of a agreement between the International Paralympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee first established in 2001, the winner of the bid for the 2020 Summer Olympics must also host the 2020 Summer Paralympics. After the second round of voting, which followed a tie-breaker, the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics were awarded to Tokyo at the 125th IOC Session.

Paralympic History.

Paralympic games include 28 sporting events with badminton and Taekwondo being the recently added sport.

Participating Countries

On 9 December 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) banned Russia from all international sport for a period of four years, after the Russian government was found to have tampered with lab data that it provided to WADA in January 2019 as a condition of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency being reinstated. As a result of the ban, WADA will allow individually cleared Russian athletes to take part in the 2020 Summer Paralympics under a neutral banner, as instigated at the 2018 Winter Paralympics, but they will not be permitted to compete in team sports. On 26 April 2021 it was confirmed Russian athletes would represent the Russian Paralympic Committee, with the acronym ‘RPC’.

On 16 August the Afghanistan team withdrew from the Tokyo Paralympics due to the current violence and instability in the country.

As of 16 August 2021, the following 135 NPCs have qualified. Bhutan and Guyana will make their debut appearances at the Paralympic Games while the Solomon Islands will make their second appearance after missing out of the 2016 Summer Paralympics.