Russia’s 2020 Weightlifting Championship rescheduled for autumn over COVID-19
21:09, 29 April
The 2020 Russian Weightlifting Championship, which was scheduled for June in Chechnya’s Grozny, will be moved to autumn, Maxim Agapitov, the president of the Russian Weightlifting Federation (RWF), told TASS on Wednesday.
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"The Russian Weightlifting Championship, which was initially scheduled to be organized in Grozny this June, will be postponed," Agapitov said. "We are most likely to move this tournament to early autumn."
"There will be a new date announced for the tournament and in case Grozny will be still able to host it, the organizers of the tournament remain unchanged," he continued.
"However, we have alternatives in case Grozny decides to pull out," Agapitov stated. "Exact dates will be announced after athletes cleared of quarantine and begin trainings. This is all it is about."
Two weeks ago, Agapitov told TASS that the 2020 European Weightlifting Championship in the Russian capital of Moscow, which was rescheduled for mid-June due to the COVID-19 pandemic, had been postponed again until autumn.
The championship was initially scheduled to be hosted by Moscow on April 4-12, but on March 10 the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF) announced a decision to move the tournament for June 13-21 as a preventive measure against the ongoing global spread of the novel coronavirus.
The European Weightlifting Championship in Moscow had the status of the qualifying tournament for the Summer Olympic Games in Japan.
In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia.
On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 3,167,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 219,600 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 976,500 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.
To date, a total of 99,399 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Russia, with 10,286 patients having recovered from the virus. Russia’s latest data indicates 972 fatalities nationwide. Earlier, the Russian government set up an Internet hotline to keep the public updated on the coronavirus situation.
