Covid at the World Athletics Championships: the mixed 4×400 risks running without owners

From our correspondent Andrea Buongiovanni

& commat; abuongi

July 14
– EUGENE (USA)

There is a reason why the Eugene World Cup has been postponed from 2021 to 2022. It is the same reason that forced the Tokyo Olympics to be postponed by a season: it’s called Covid. The epidemic has not given up for over two years. With its various variations it has gradually less dramatic effects, but it continues to creep in. Especially where groups of different origins aggregate and the virus can spread more easily. It is a planetary problem. Thus, even the review starting tomorrow must inevitably make up the accounts.

Mixed relay

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Even within the Italian national team the situation is on the alert, very delicate. In the group – as already after the Mediterranean Games in Oran, in Algeria – there are some cases of positive athletes, although now substantially asymptomatic: they concern a couple of sectors, as well as some staff members. In particular that of the fifteenth century, returning from a week’s meeting in Florence, a town overlooking the Pacific Ocean, just over a hundred kilometers from Eugene. The problem is double because, in addition to the individual tests (the men’s first round, to which Davide Re and Edoardo Scotti are admitted, is already on the calendar on Sunday), the three 4×400 relays are also affected. Italy is admitted to all: to the two gender and to the mixed one. With the aggravating circumstance that the heats and the final of the latter (two men and two women, with only one change possible in the meantime) are scheduled immediately tomorrow, on the first day of competitions (at 11.45 and 19.50 local time, 20.45 and 4.50 on Saturday night in Italy).

Without owners

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The athletes in question, upon arrival in Eugene, were isolated from the rest of the team, in a hotel, but to have access to the “Village” (the university campus adjacent to Hayward Field) and therefore, in order to compete, they will have to overcome also an official test. Translated it means that tomorrow the hypothetically starting quartet, which cultivated realistic hopes of landing in the final – a goal at the Tokyo Games missed by only 57/100 of a second even with the national record raised to 3’13 ”51 – will not be able to be deployed. With all the relative consequences. The tricolor one is an uphill start.