Rikako Ikee Gets First Lap as Tokyo Olympic Swimming Venue Opens

Rikako Ikee; Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick

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The Tokyo Olympic Committee formally opened the swimming venue for the 2021 Olympics on Saturday, with Rikako Ikee taking part in a ceremonial opening relay.

Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike was at Saturday’s unveiling, finally getting to show off a venue that was done in February. The originally scheduled March reveal was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic that delayed the Olympics by a year. It comes nine months ahead of the scheduled date for the Opening Ceremonies of the delayed Games on July 23, 2021.

The swimming venue will seat 15,000 fans. Situated off Tokyo Bay, the price tag checks in at a reported $520 million, the second most expensive venue, behind only the $1.43 billion national stadium that will host the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. The five-level arena will host swimming, diving and artistic swimming events. It’s one of six purpose-built venues for the games.

The aquatic center is a big item on a budget that, at a price tag of $12.6 billion, is as the most expensive Olympics ever, per an academic study.

Ikee formally baptized the pool, the latest step in the promising young star’s inspiring battle back from a leukemia diagnosis more than a year ago. The 20-year-old has explicitly set her sights on the 2024 Games, though she returned to competing in August and will ramp up her schedule in the latter part of this year.

“After seeing the pool, it finally hit me that next year, this is where the Olympics will be held,” Ikee said in a statement released by her management agency.

The swimming venue is the final one to be officially introduced, which starts a much more unprecedented process of how to make safe a major international event during the era of an extremely contagious virus. The Tokyo organizing committee is weighing strategies to make it happen, from health screenings for athletes to how fans will fill venues. Getting athletes into Japan, which has kept its COVID-19 case numbers low thanks to stringent immigration controls, is another obstacle.

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