Greece's entire artistic swimming team is out of Tokyo Olympics because of COVID cases

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TOKYO — Greece will miss the team competition in artistic swimming after five members of the 12-woman team tested positive for COVID-19 and the others were deemed to be close contacts, Tokyo organizers announced Wednesday.

Evangelia Papazoglou and Evangelia Platanioti had already been ruled out of the technical prelims of the duet event, which were Tuesday. They had been 10th in Monday’s preliminaries for the free routine. The team competition begins Friday.

All 12 team members have been moved out of the Olympic Village and are in quarantine, Tokyo 2020 spokesman Takaya Masa said Wednesday.

“We judged the monitoring had to be strengthened, and it was decided to do it outside the village,” Takaya said. “They had made a huge effort and actually came to Japan under difficult circumstances. I imagine the expectations from the Greek people for these athletes were quite high so it’s painful to think of them.”

Tokyo organizers reported 29 new cases of COVID-19 among Olympic personnel on Wednesday, a single-day high since they began tracking on July 1. Four of those were athletes, also a single-day high.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 2021 Olympics: Greece artistic swimming team out of Games due to COVID