2020 Summer Paralympics
The 2020 Summer Paralympics, branded as the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, were an international multi-sport parasports event held from 24 August to 5 September 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. They were the 16th Summer Paralympic Games as organized by the International Paralympic Committee.
Originally scheduled to take place from 25 August to 6 September 2020, both the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics were postponed by a year in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the rescheduled Games still referred to as Tokyo 2020 for marketing and branding purposes. As with the Olympics, the Games were largely held behind closed doors with no outside spectators due to a state of emergency in the Greater Tokyo Area and other prefectures. The Games were the second Summer Paralympics hosted by Tokyo since 1964, and the third Paralympics held in Japan overall since the 1998 Winter Paralympics in Nagano. Due to the postponement of the Paralympics because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was also the first Paralympic Games to be held in an odd-numbered year and the first Summer Paralympics to be held in a non-leap year.
The Games featured 539 medal events in 22 sports, with badminton and taekwondo both making their Paralympic debut to replace football 7-a-side and sailing. China topped the medal table for the fifth consecutive Paralympics, with 96 golds and 207 total medals. Great Britain finished second for the ninth time, with 41 golds and 124 total medals. The United States finished third, with 37 golds, their best finish since the 2008 games, and 104 total medals. The Russian Paralympic Committee finished fourth, with a total of 36 golds and 118 total medals, putting them in third place when ranked by total medals.
Bids
The host of the 2020 Summer Olympics would also host the 2020 Summer Paralympics, according to a 2001 agreement between the International Paralympic Committee and the International Olympic Committee. At the 125th IOC Session, Tokyo was awarded the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics via a tie-breaker in the second round of voting.Preparations
Transport
Ahead of the 2016 Summer Paralympics closing ceremony, Governor of Tokyo Yuriko Koike advocated for the city to improve its accessibility as a legacy project for the Games. She cited narrow roadways with no sidewalks, buildings constructed with narrow doorways, and low ceilings, as challenges that needed to be overcome. In particular, she called for a transition to underground power lines to facilitate the widening of roads.A number of Toyota e-Palette self-driving vehicles had been adapted to provide transport to athletes in the Paralympic Games village. On 27 August, however, the use of the vehicles was suspended after one collided with an athlete before all vehicles were re-used 3 days later.
Volunteers
In September 2018, applications to be volunteers at the Olympic and Paralympic Games were released. By January 2019 186,101 applications had been received. Interviews to whittle the numbers down began in February 2019 and training taking place in October 2019. The volunteers at the venues were known as "Field Cast" and the volunteers in the city were known as "City Cast". These names were chosen from a shortlist of four out of an original 149 pairs of names. The other shortlisted names were "Shining Blue and Shining Blue Tokyo", "Games Anchor and City Anchor" and "Games Force and City Force". The names were chosen by the people who had applied to be volunteers at the games.Medals
The designs of the medals for the 2020 Summer Paralympics were unveiled on 25 August 2019; as with the Olympic medals, they are constructed using recycled metals that were obtained through an electronics recycling programme. The medals feature a design inspired by traditional folding hand fans to symbolise the shared experience of the Paralympics; alternating sectors containing textured areas visually and tactually depict flowers, leaves, rocks, water and wood to symbolise the geology of Japan. The pivot where the fan meets is stated to symbolise the unity of Paralympic athletes. The obverse of the medal contains an untextured version of the fan pattern, the Paralympic emblem, and inscriptions in braille. To aid those with visual impairments, the edges and ribbons of the medals contain one, two, or three circular indentations and silicone convex dots for gold, silver, and bronze medals respectively so that they can be easily identified by touch.Medals used in the games
| Bronze medal | Silver medal | Gold medal |
Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
The 2020 Summer Olympics were largely held behind closed doors due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan, and a state of emergency in Tokyo issued by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, though events in some regions could be held with up to 10,000 spectators or 50% capacity if they were not subject to a state of emergency. The declaration was originally in effect from 12 July through 22 August 2021 ; on 2 August, citing worsening rates of infection, Suga announced that the existing state of emergency would be extended through 31 August, and expanded to several other prefectures.New daily cases in Tokyo reached over 4,000 by 11 August 2021; it was anticipated that no public spectators would be admitted during the Paralympics in Tokyo and other affected regions, as with the Olympics. Organizers discussed other options for some form of spectator presence, such as inviting local school students to attend events. It was later confirmed that there would be no public spectators at venues in the Tokyo, Chiba, and Saitama prefectures. On 19 August, the state of emergency was extended through 12 September 2021, and expanded to include Shizuoka.
On 20 August 2021, Tokyo Organizing Committee delivery officer Hidemasa Nakamura stated that the biosecurity protocols for the Paralympics had been expanded upon those from the Olympics due to the increased vulnerability to COVID-19 among its athletes, but that Tokyo was facing deteriorating hospital capacity, and that "It's a fight against time so we need to make sure that sufficient communication is taken at a speedy manner." Paula Tesoriero of the New Zealand delegation stated that the Tokyo Organizing Committee and IPC had "worked tirelessly to create the safest and secure environment possible with a focus on continuing to stay vigilant".
On 4 September, after four consecutive days without any new COVID-19 cases within the Paralympic bubble, the IPC commended the Tokyo Organizing Committee for their work in handling the pandemic, with a spokesperson stating that "the amount of work that has gone in behind the scenes to deliver what you have seen over the past three weeks has been phenomenal."
Torch relay
The details of the torch relay route were announced on 21 November 2019. There was a Heritage Flame Celebration that was held in Stoke Mandeville, and flame lighting festivals that took place in 43 of Japan's 47 prefectures between 13 and 17 August 2020. In the second phase of the relay, another 4 rituals were performed in the 3 other prefectures that were jointly hosting the events with Tokyo between 18 and 20 August throughout the three prefectures that co-hosted Paralympic events during the run-up to the Paralympic Opening Ceremony and the last day the Tokyo Prefecture torch was lit. The flames from each of the flame lighting festivals hosted in each prefecture were brought together in Tokyo. On the night of August 21, at the front of the Akasaka Palace all the 48 flames were unified and the third and last phase of the relay began and lasted 4 days. This rote was the same used for the last legs of the 2020 Summer Olympics torch relay.Aluminium was taken from temporary housing in Fukushima to make the torches for the Olympic and Paralympic flames. More than 10,000 pieces of aluminium were used and organizers contacted local authorities to see which houses were no longer being used.
The Games
Sports
The 2020 Summer Paralympics featured 539 events in 22 sports. Badminton and taekwondo made their Paralympic debut in Tokyo, while classifications were added or realigned in other sports; canoe, shooting, table tennis, track cycling, and wheelchair fencing saw increases in the number of medal events held, while there were reductions in athletics and swimming.| 2020 Summer Paralympic Sports Programme |
New sports
In January 2014, the IPC began accepting bids for new sports to be added to the Paralympic programme. Six sports were reported to have made bids, including amputee football, badminton, power hockey, powerchair football, and taekwondo. New disciplines were also proposed in existing events, including 3x3 basketball, and visually impaired match racing and one-person multi-hull in sailing.On 31 January 2015, the IPC officially announced that badminton and taekwondo had been added to the Paralympic programme for 2020. They replaced football 7-a-side and sailing, which were dropped due to an insufficient international reach.
Participating National Paralympic Committees
On 9 December 2019, the World Anti-Doping Agency 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. On 26 April 2021, it was confirmed Russian athletes would represent the Russian Paralympic Committee, with the acronym 'RPC'.At least five countries withdrew from the Games due to COVID-19-related concerns, including North Korea, as well as Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga, and Vanuatu due to budgetary concerns tied to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Absent direct flights to Japan, the four countries' athletes would have had to travel to Tokyo via Australia and New Zealand as international borders to those countries for non-residents had been closed since March 2020, and would be subject to 14-day quarantine periods before their flight to Japan, and on their way back to their home countries.
On 16 August 2021, Afghanistan withdrew from the Games due to violence and instability in the country following the Taliban's capture of Kabul, which left their team of Zakia Khudadadi and Hossain Rasouli unable to travel to Tokyo. Their national flag was still paraded during the opening ceremony as a signal of solidarity. However, after a "major global operation", the two athletes were successfully evacuated to France, where they trained at INSEP in Paris before arriving in a flight with the Paris 2024 delegation in Tokyo on 28 August. IPC president Andrew Parsons stated that the team would not be available to press conferences and were given special permission to skip interacting with other athletes at the village. Rasouli missed the event where he was originally intended to compete, the men's 100m T47. After declining an offer to compete in the 400m event as an alternative, Rasouli accepted an extra spot in the men's long jump T47.
The following 162 teams qualified at least one athlete. Six of them, Bhutan, Grenada, Guyana, Maldives, Paraguay, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, made their debut appearances at the Paralympic Games. Two of them returned to the Games after not sending delegations in 2016: Barbados along with Luxembourg.
| Participating National Paralympic Committee teams |
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Afghanistan|2020 Summer|2