The Tokyo Marathon, one of the world’s largest races, with an estimated 38,000 runners, has been restricted to elite runners because of new cases of the coronavirus confirmed within Japan, organizers announced Monday. After a case of the viral respiratory disease was confirmed in Tokyo, the organizers said in a statement, they could not “continue to launch the event within the scale we originally anticipated.”The marathon, scheduled for March 1, will be held only for elite runners and wheelchair athletes, a field that now includes about 200 participants. More than 300,000 runners had applied to run the Tokyo Marathon, which draws hundreds of thousands of spectators and more than 10,000 volunteers annually. The race is one of the Abbott World Marathon Majors, a collection of the six largest marathons in the world.

Source: International New York Times February 17, 2020 18:45 UTC