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The 2020 European Athletics Championships have been cancelled.

The executive committee met in Paris with the Paris Athlé 2020 Organising Committee as well as the Francaise d’Athlétisme (the French Athletics Federation) and decided to cancel the meet which was scheduled to take place August 25-30 at the Charléty Stadium.

The cancellation, as expected, is due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic as well as the uncertainty of when social gathering will return.

Their decision was further solidified in regards to the athletics calendar potentially becoming very busy weeks or months after August. For fear over overloading the calendar, they opted to cancel.

Jean Gracia, president of the Organising Committee European Athletics Championships Paris 2020 wrote, “Driven by the passion around a competent, dynamic and motivated team, we studied specific plans geared around hosting the event. However, despite great expectations on the part of the athletes, we’ve made the decision with the FFA to take the logical step in terms of the responsibility that has guided our decisions over recent weeks. This decision, which has been hard to make, is also a way for us to contribute to the fight to combat the pandemic, by avoiding sizeable gatherings of people from a great variety of backgrounds, both nationally and internationally.”

Currently there are 2,725, 391 cases of Coronavirus, which has resulted in 191,055 deaths. To date, 745, 821 people have recovered.

On March 8, France set place a ban of gatherings of more than 1,000 people to contain the virus. Since then, the restrictions have increased greatly, although they plan to begin a gradual lifting of public gatherings starting May 11.

The city of Paris has had at least 3,000 people in hospital, 600 of which were in intensive care, while all-toll there was 1,288 deaths. Countrywide there has been 120,000 cases reported and 22,000 have died.