AFP, Tokyo :
Japan’s northern Hokkaido region was supposed to offer cooler climes for next week’s Olympic marathons and race walks, but now the area is battling a heatwave. Olympic organisers moved the two events from Tokyo in 2019, worried that even shifting the start times to dawn would not be enough to keep athletes safe from the heat.
The summer temperatures in Hokkaido’s Sapporo were expected to be kinder — around five or six degrees Celsius cooler than Tokyo, the International Olympic Committee said.
