World Para Athletics Championships postponed again

This summer’s World Para Athletics Championships have been postponed for a second time. The competition, which was supposed to take place in Kobe, Japan from August 26 to September 4, has been pushed back until 2024 after “consideration of the ongoing situation presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Track repeats with World Para Athletics 1,500m champion Nate Riech

The Championships were originally meant to take place in 2020, but the Kobe Local Organising Committee (LOC) postponed them until 2022 in light of the COVID-19 situation both in Japan and globally. Now, a year after the Paralympic Games were held in Tokyo, organizers have decided yet again to push the Championships back for another two years.

“Both World Para Athletics and the LOC have reached an understanding that the competition will not take place in 2022,” said World Para Athletics, according to Athletics Weekly.”Both parties are working closely to assess the feasibility of a postponement to 2024 in order to retain the World Championships within the Paris 2024 cycle.”

This means the championships scheduled to take place in Paris in 2023 will remain the same, and Kobe will host them again one year later, the same year Paris will host the Paralympics. The last World Para Athletics Championships were hosted in Dubai in 2019, so it will be four years since the last championships when athletes finally arrive in Paris next year.

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No final decision has been made, but if the International Paralympic Committee follows this schedule, there will be World Para Athletics Championships three years in a row — in 2023, 2024 and 2025.