BEIJING: The 2022 Asian Games scheduled to be held in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou in September has been postponed, the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) said in a statement on Friday as China battles an ongoing wave of Omicron-led Covid-19 resurgence in many parts of the country.
The 19th edition of the multi-sports Games, second in size only to the Summer Olympics, was scheduled to take place between September 10 and 25 in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, less than 200 km southwest of Shanghai, which is currently battling its worst Covid-19 epidemic.
“The Hangzhou Asian Games Organising Committee has been very well prepared to deliver the Games on time despite global challenges. However, the above decision was taken by all the stakeholders after carefully considering the pandemic situation and the size of the Games,” the OCA said in a statement.
The Games will now be held in 2023, a Reuters report from New Delhi said.
While the Asian Youth Games to be held in Shantou city has been cancelled, the World University Games to be held in Chengdu has also been postponed.
The decision to postpone the Asian Games was taken at an OCA executive board meeting in Tashkent on Friday.
The postponement of the Games, still a good four months away, is a setback for China especially after it held the Winter Olympics in Beijing and neighbouring Hebei province – by Beijing’s own acknowledgement “successfully” – in February and March.
Though hundreds of Covid-19 cases were reported among the athletes and officials who stayed inside strict bubbles for the Winter Olympics, large-scale outbreaks were avoided in the venues spread across three clusters.
Covid-19 outbreaks from across the country, however, were reported soon after the Winter Games got over.
The Asian Games has been deferred as China fights Covid-19 outbreaks in multiple provinces including in two of its biggest cities, Shanghai, locked down for weeks, and Beijing, which is currently facing many Covid-19-containing curbs.
The decision to postpone the Games could have also been made in view of the twice-in-a-decade Communist Party of China (CPC) leadership change scheduled to take place in the second half of 2022.
The five-yearly CPC Congress usually takes place during the October-November period in Beijing but the party leadership possibly did not want to take a chance of an outbreak related to the Games for which, a large number of athletes and officials would have descended on Hangzhou.
On Thursday, presiding over a meeting of the top CPC leadership, President Xi Jinping was quoted as having said “unswervingly adhere to the general policy of ‘dynamic zero-Covid’, and resolutely fight against any words and acts that distort, doubt or deny our country’s epidemic prevention policies.”
“Our prevention and control strategy is determined by the party’s nature and mission, our policies can stand the test of history, (and) our measures are scientific and effective,” the seven-member Standing Committee of the CPC’s Politburo, China’s top decision-making body, official news agency Xinhua reported.
Officially, the decision to postpone the upcoming Games was taken after consultations between OCA and the Chinese Olympic Committee (COC) and the Hangzhou Asian Games Organising Committee (HAGOC), Chinese state media reports said on Friday afternoon.
This would have been the third Asian Games to be held in China following the Beijing games in 1990 and the first, in the southern city of Guangzhou in 2010.
Until recently, Chinese state media was reporting that Hangzhou was fully prepared for the Games.
“With almost half a year to go before the Hangzhou 2022 Asian Games, venues are ready for a Green, Smart, Economical and Ethical Asian Games,” the official news agency, Xinhua, said in a report in March.
“Yangshan Sports Climbing Center, located in Keqiao District, Shaoxing, is the last venue scheduled to be finished by the end of March 2022, among the construction of all venues. As it passed the inspection of sports events function…, all 56 venues for the Hangzhou Asian Games and the Asian Para Games have been completed,” the report said.