Global event now begins on Wednesday to allow all participants to arrive and settle down
Global athletics governing body World Athletics has pushed the much awaited World Under 20 Athletics Championships by a day to allow all teams to arrive and settle down.
The Championships scheduled to be held at the Kasarani Stadium in Nairobi, between August 17-22, will now begin on Wednesday and is expected to run until Sunday.
A statement by the the World Athletics cited the impact of Covid 19 on teams traveling and the logistics of moving vital equipment around the world had proven to be a challenge.
“However, the full athletics programme is able to be accommodated across five days rather than five-and-a-half days with minimal impact on the athletes attending from more than 100 countries,” read the statement.
The statement further says a new schedule would deliver a fuller and faster paced event and the organisers were delighted that the broadcast rights for the championships had been taken up by more than 14 countries, with 12 of them showing the event live.
For all other countries, World Athletics will be livestreaming the morning and evening sessions on its YouTube channel.
Full details of how to watch the event will be issued in the coming days.
“Over the past 18 months World Athletics has been determined to give athletes as many opportunities as possible to compete, despite the complex conditions the world still faces in fighting the pandemic.
We would like to thank our athletes and their teams, our suppliers and the local organising committee in Kenya for accommodating this change and working collaboratively in challenging times to stage a great championships for these young, promising athletes as they begin their athletics journey,” the statement read.
It went ahead: “The next four years offers unprecedented opportunities for these promising young athletes to move on to the senior World Championships and Olympic stages as we present World Athletics Championships in Oregon in 2022, Budapest in 2023, the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024 and another World Athletics Championships in 2025 which will be awarded to a host city early next year.”
While Chelsea were rock solid at the back after Tuchel’s appointment, they were less impressive in attack where Timo Werner, Hakim Ziyech and Christian Pulisic all struggled for consistency.
Lukaku’s goalscoring prowess could be the final piece of the puzzle in Tuchel’s transformation of the Londoners.
