Buenos Aires Notebook: Final Push for YOG Medals Begins

(ATR) The final three days of the 2018 Youth Olympic Games are a dash to the Games’ final medals.

Ten sports are in action today including athletics, archery, basketball 3x3, gymnastics, and modern pentathlon.

Buenos Aires 2018 is expecting to hit another attendance milestone after surpassing 700,000 at all events including the Opening Ceremony through yesterday. That threshold now makes the 2018 YOG the most attended YOG in history.

"We expect the total attendance at around one million people including the opening ceremony," a Buenos Aires 2018 spokesperson said to Around the Rings.

IOC President Thomas Bach today will add three more sports to his tour of the Buenos Aires sport program. By the end of the day he will have attended athletics, archery, and modern pentathlon, a spokesperson confirmed.

Sports with elimination tournaments have reached the final knockout stages. In many sports, matches today will constitute either quarterfinal or semifinal events.

Athletics dominates the program today with 11 sets of medals to be awarded in the final day of competition. Both track and field disciplines will be contested in the Youth Olympic Park.

In the Urban Park athletes are taking part in the Canoe obstacle course discipline. Instead of building a slalom course, which may not have a defined legacy and would have cost a lot of money, the canoers are to paddle around fixed buoys in the rowing and canoeing venue.

Tomorrow, archery, basketball, beach volleyball, boxing, cycling, diving, futsal, and karate will all hold finals in closing out nearly all the sport program. The final day of action will have medal events in boxing, futsal, and karate.

The final event of the 2018 Youth Olympic Games will be the gold medal bout in women’s 57-60 kg boxing. Semifinals for the weight category will be held today between Emma Lawson of Australia fighting Porntip Buapa of Thailand and Caroline Sara Dubois of Great Britain fighting hometown favorite Oriana Saputo. Dubois is considered a medal contender in two years at Tokyo 2020.

Coverage of the Buenos Aires 2018 Youth Olympic Games is made possible in part by BA 2018

Written by Aaron Bauer in Buenos Aires

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