IOC confirms venues for swimming, open water at Tokyo 2020 Olympics, water polo to move facilities

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has confirmed the host venues for a number of Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games athletic events, including most of the aquatics disciplines.

Swimming, open water, diving and synchronized swimming will all remain at the locations specified in Tokyo’s Olympic bid, but water polo will move to a different, already-existing venue.

Swimming, diving and synchro are set to be held in the soon-to-be-built Olympic Aquatics Centre, which is set to be a $400 million project that will eventually hold an unprecedented 20,000 spectators.

An announcement by the IOC this week confirms that those events will take place in the new facility. The open water competition and the swimming portion of the triathlon will be hosted in the Odaiba Marine Park. The only aquatic sport to move venues is water polo, which will take place in the already-existing Tatsumi International Swimming Centre instead of proposed water polo arena that would have been constructed next to the Olympic Aquatics Centre.

That brings the total number of sports with confirmed 2020 venues to 26, after two rounds of official confirmations from the IOC. A few other sports were moved to already-existing venues: fencing, taekwondo and wrestling, and the IOC reports that those decisions and others will save around $700 million from the proposed Tokyo 2020 construction budget.

The big news for the sport of swimming is that the planned new aquatics facility is now locked in as a venue. The proposed venue will continue to expand spectator seating from previous Olympic Games, and will remain a public aquatic facility after the Games, though the spectator seating will be drastically reduced once the Olympics conclude.

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ERVINFORTHEWIN
9 years ago

Very blindfold to organize the Olympics while having on it’s shoulders the Biggest Nuclear catastrophy still going on at a very deep level … with no solutions yet . Sorry guys , unaccaptable .

Gina Rhinestone
9 years ago

We should help Japan & say – we don’t need these fancy venues. You have other priorities such as the nuclear plant cleanup & a mystifying Godzilla public debt , demographic decline & the usual Japanese peculiarities .

The IOC should step away & let Japan offer a no frills basic functional on time games . As Duh says – they can do it & they are very good at pushing people into small places & fast trains .their food is nice & they are polite.

Good to go.

duh
9 years ago

Of course the Japanese are well prepared. 2020 will be awesome.

Optimistic
9 years ago

It seems like Tokyo is almost more ready than Rio…

About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

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