Kuwait City: China will host the 2022 Asian Games in 2023, organizers announced on Tuesday, following the event in Hangzhou due to Covid.
The Games will now take place in Hangzhou from September 23 to October 8, 2023, the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) announced.
The event was originally scheduled for September this year, but organizers postponed it until May, as China tried to eliminate a major Covid resurgence in various parts of the country.
Hangzhou is less than two hundred kilometers (120 miles) from the country’s largest city, Shanghai, which suffered a months-long shutdown this year as part of the ruling Communist Party’s zero-tolerance policy on the virus.
The OCA said Tuesday that the new dates were selected for “conflicts with other major foreign sporting events. “
The Asian Games attract more than 10,000 athletes from across the region.
China is the newest primary economy committed to eliminating the domestic spread of the virus through serious lockdowns, massive controls and strict controls on foreign travel.
But it has damaged the country’s foreign sporting ambitions, with the world’s most populous country cancelling or postponing as much as possible each and every event since the pandemic began, with the exception of this year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing.
The World University Games, which were scheduled to begin in June in Chengdu and have already changed since last year, were also postponed again until 2023.
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