Editor’s Letter
I am writing this letter from the Main Press Centre in Tokyo, the day after the conclusion of the Paralympic rowing at Tokyo 2020. It marks the end of a precarious and tumultuous 18-month journey set in motion on March 24th, 2020, when it was announced that the 2020 Olympic Games could not go ahead as planned. The following month it was announced that the Games would be postponed by exactly one year. The delay threw teams and athletes into a world of uncertainty – for many it signalled the end of their Olympic dreams.
Who knows what the results would have been a year earlier – I suspect many would have been very different – and some would have likely been the same. The Sinkovic brothers, for example, are a class act and the gold medal in the pair (after their gold in the double in Rio) looked theirs – pandemic or not. Likewise, Gowler and Prendergast looked unlikely to ever let anyone past them. Elsewhere though we were treated to some extraordinary and unexpected performances – the stuff that Olympic fairytales are made of – not least in the men’s single sculls where ex-lightweight, Stefanos Ntouskos of Greece, came out of nowhere to upset the world’s greatest single scullers on the world’s biggest stage.