By Amlan Chakraborty
NEW DELHI (Reuters) -The Asian Games scheduled to take place in the Chinese city of Hangzhou in September has been postponed until 2023 because of the prevailing COVID-19 situation, Randhir Singh, the acting President of the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA), told Reuters on Friday.
The 19th edition of the multi-sports Games, second in size only to the Summer Olympics, was scheduled to take place from Sept. 10-25 in the capital of Zhejiang province, some 175 kilometres southwest of Shanghai.
Question marks had been raised over the event taking place with Shanghai having recently been locked down because of a COVID-19 outbreak.
The local organising committee did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The decision to postpone the Games was taken at a OCA executive board meeting in Tashkent on Friday.
Most international sporting events in China have been postponed or cancelled since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the notable exception of the Winter Olympics, which went ahead in Beijing under strict health controls in February.
Hangzhou organisers said in early April that all 56 competition venues for the Games had been completed and test events were continuing as the lakeside city prepared to host more than 11,000 athletes from 44 nations and territories.
(Additional reporting by Sudipto Ganguly and Martin Pollard, Editing by Himani Sarkar/Peter Rutherford)
