Japan's women footballers to be first torch bearers at Olympic torch relay

TOKYO -- Japan's women's football World Cup-winning team will be the first torchbearers of the Tokyo Olympic torch relay, which will start at the J-Village National Training Centre in Fukushima prefecture on March 25, organizers said here on Monday.

The Tokyo 2020 organizing committee announced that Fukushima prefecture will host a start ceremony for the Olympic torch relay, which was hit hard by the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident in 2011.

To contain the spread of COVID-19, the number of participants in the ceremony will be substantially curtailed and the program has been simplified and the number of performers reduced, organizers said in a statement.

Members of the Japanese national women's football team, who won the World Cup in 2011, will be the first torchbearers of the Olympic flame, lit at the Temple of Hera at Ancient Olympia in Greece on March 12, 2020.

The start ceremony and the first section of the opening day's torch relay in Fukushima, from the J-Village All-Weather Training Area to the J-Village Station, will not be open to the public, but it will be broadcast live via a Tokyo 2020 official channel.

The torch relay will traverse all 47 prefectures across Japan for 121 days before arriving at the Olympic Games opening ceremony on the night of July 23.

The Olympic flame, which arrived in Japan on March 20 last year before the Games was postponed, has been kept on display in Japan during the past year.