World News for Students of English

09-07-2021 07:00

With three weeks to go until the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, getting athletes to Japan seems like a logistical nightmare with rising COVID-19 infections.

Ensuring 11,000 athletes from more than 200 countries descend on one chosen city over the course of 16 days is normally a logistical challenge. For example, under normal circumstances, the Sri Lankan team would take a flight to Singapore and from there onto Tokyo. However, with COVID-19 cases still at almost 2,000 a day, Sri Lanka’s on many countries’ banned lists, and Singapore doesn’t allow anyone with recent travel history to even move through the city.

Although most athletes have been fully vaccinated, there have already been some upsets when two members of Uganda’s Olympic team tested positive in Japan last month.

Another logistics problem during the pandemic has been that many athletes haven’t been able to train in the locations that they normally would. Difficulty with international travel has also made getting to the necessary qualifying events extremely tricky.

Difficult words: logistics, logistical (related to the process of organizing and transporting something or someone to the final destination), descend (to go or come down), challenge (a situation that needs great effort in order to be done).

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