SINGAPORE – The 2025 World Athletics Championships will head to Tokyo, which held off competition from Singapore, Kenya and Poland, track and field’s governing body announced after a council meeting in Eugene, Oregon on Thursday (July 14).
The Straits Times had reported in June that the Japanese capital and the Republic were touted as front-runners for the bid to host the biennial meet, which will kick off its 18th edition, postponed a year due to the pandemic, in the United States on Friday.
In response to media queries, a spokesman for Sport Singapore (SportSG) congratulated Tokyo and added: “While the decision did not go Singapore’s way, we believe that through this bid process we have strengthened our relationship with World Athletics and demonstrated the potential for athletics in Southeast Asia.
“We remain committed to bringing international sporting events to Singapore and will continue to pursue sporting events that are aligned to our strategic interests.”
World Athletics said in a media statement that while all the bids were “deemed strong enough and experienced enough”, Tokyo scored the highest of the four candidates in the bid evaluation across the four focused areas.
These were namely “the potential for a powerful narrative”, revenue-generating opportunities, raising the sport’s international profile and the appropriate climate.
It added that Tokyo would have the opportunity to fill its National Stadium with fans who were unable to attend last year’s July 23-Aug 8 Olympics due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Hungary will host the 2023 edition in Budapest.
World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said: “Within an extremely strong field of candidates… Tokyo offered a compelling bid.
“I hope this will be a shining light for Japan as they celebrate 100 years of the Japanese Association of Athletics Federations in 2025, by bringing world-class athletics back to the people in Tokyo.”
Singapore Athletics president Lien Choong Luen, who is in Eugene with the Singapore bid team, said the process has helped them “strengthen relations between the different member athletic associations” in the region as well as World Athletics.
“Internally, all the different parts of the eco-system put in huge amounts of work to deliver a compelling bid that reflected the many strengths of Singapore,” he added.
“This enhanced trust and understanding will help us innovate and deliver a stronger proposition for the future, to build new athletics and sports legacy for Singapore.”
National agency SportSG had announced in March that it had made a move to host the 20th edition of the world championships, with the bid called Singapore25.
An evaluation committee from World Athletics had visited Singapore in mid-May, before heading to Japan a week later.
The Singapore25 bid threw up an intriguing option for World Athletics.
The Republic boasted the necessary infrastructure and world-class facilities, such as the 55,000-capacity National Stadium built in 2014, and also offered a gateway into a potentially lucrative and previously largely untapped market in South-east Asia.
Singapore25 had also partnered hotel tycoon Ong Beng Seng – the man behind the success of the Singapore Grand Prix Formula One race – in the hopes of delivering similar success.
But Japan’s bid was strong from the start, given that Tokyo hosted the Olympics. Two previous hosts of the Olympics – Beijing (2008) and London (2012) – later hosted the World Championships, in 2015 and 2017 respectively.
The selection of Tokyo as host city means the World Championships will return to Asia for the sixth time.
Japan hosted it twice before, in Tokyo (1991) and Osaka (2007), and the meet was also staged in Daegu, South Korea (2011), Beijing (2015) and Doha (2019).
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MCI (P) 031/10/2021, MCI (P) 032/10/2021. Published by SPH Media Limited, Co. Regn. No. 202120748H. Copyright © 2021 SPH Media Limited. All rights reserved.