INTERNATIONAL: The 2020 Paralympic Games are underway in Tokyo. Tuesday evening sees the Opening Ceremony, followed by 12 days of competition. Cambodia has one athlete at the Paralympics. Van Von will compete in the T-54 category of the 100m wheelchair race. He arrived in Tokyo on Monday together with his mission head and coach Yi Sopheaktra.

Hours before the opening ceremony, the International Paralympic Committee addressed the media saying the flag of Afghanistan will appear as a sign of solidarity with the athletes who were unable to travel due to the sudden fall of Kabul last week, but it was the pandemic that was on most people’s minds, as IPC President Andrew Parsons confirmed:

"One of the questions I have been asked quite often is, can we have safe Games? And the answer is yes. We would not be here if we did not believe that we could deliver safe Games. The Olympics have shown that the playbooks work. We do understand, of course, the rise in number of cases in Tokyo, in Japan, but we do not believe that that is a cause-effect relationship between the fact that we are here for the Paralympics and the numbers rising in Japan."

Parsons says the Olympic Games did not become the “super-spreader” event everyone feared and that the Paralympic Games won’t do either.