469 golds, 43 sports, 16 days
The numbers attached to the 20th Summer Asian Games dwarf anything on the Olympic programme. 469 gold medals will be handed out across 43 sports and 71 disciplines between now and October 4. Paris 2024 ran 329 events in total. That gap is the quickest way to understand what opened in Nagoya a few hours ago.
Around 10,000 athletes are in Aichi, sent by 45 National Olympic Committees under the Olympic Council of Asia plus a refugee team. Forty-six delegations filed into the Mizuho Park Athletics Stadium in alphabetical order of their English names: Afghanistan first, DPR Korea eighth, Korea sixteenth, the refugee team forty-fifth, hosts Japan last.
The gap since the previous edition was three years rather than four. Hangzhou’s Games, scheduled for 2022, slipped to 2023 because of COVID-19, and the four-year rhythm has not been restored since.
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Japan’s first Asian Games in 32 years
Japan has staged this event twice before, Tokyo in 1958 and Hiroshima in 1994. The torch relay leaned on both. Flames collected in those two cities were combined with one lit at Nagoya Castle last month, and the result completed its final leg inside the stadium this evening.
Koji Murofushi and his father Shigenobu carried it to the cauldron. Koji took Olympic hammer gold in Athens in 2004; his father was a fixture on Asian Games podiums in the same event decades earlier. The cauldron was built around two shapes, a heart and the golden Shachihoko, the tiger-headed fish that guards Nagoya Castle.
Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako attended, alongside IOC president Kirsty Coventry, OCA president Sheikh Joaan bin Hamad Al Thani and Aichi governor Hideaki Omura, who chairs the organising committee. Nagoya-born filmmaker Yukihiko Tsutsumi directed the ceremony under the title “Harmonic Heartbeat”, with the main stage built in the shape of a heart and the opening sequence carried by a heartbeat sound.
Medals start on Sunday
The first golds are decided on Sunday in modern pentathlon and in teqball, added to the programme for this edition. The evening then delivers a Korea against Japan final in men’s basketball at 7:40 pm local time.
South Korea travelled with 1,051 athletes across 41 sports and a stated target of more than 40 golds. Ambitious, though the ceiling sits elsewhere. China has topped the Asian Games medal table at every edition since 1982, and nothing in this cycle suggests Aichi breaks the pattern.
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