Coronavirus in Germany: Berlin Marathon in September Is Canceled

German soccer teams have begun practicing, but the teams will play the remainder of the season without fans, and the league’s chief executive told The New York Times early this month that he expected games to occur without fans through the end of the year.

The other top soccer leagues in Europe — in England, Spain, Italy and France — are still working on plans that would allow them to return to play. In the United States, President Trump has pushed for a quick return for sports, but it remains unclear when and how that can happen.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said Monday that Germans should not forget that “we are still at the very beginning of the pandemic, and that we are a long way from having beaten it.” Merkel said the country needed to proceed “incrementally, slowly, carefully.”

The question now, though, is whether the decision from Germany, which has had more testing and a lower death rate from the disease than many of its neighboring countries, will lead other countries to cancel events that are now scheduled to take place in the fall, especially those in Europe. The French Open, for example, has been rescheduled for late September and early October from late May and early June.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/21/sports/berlin-marathon-germany.html