Teqball and Virtual Taekwondo Join the Asian Games and Five Thousand Athletes Will Sleep on a Cruise Ship

The Asian Games open at Paloma Mizuho Stadium in Nagoya on 19 September and close there on 4 October. There are 469 medal events across 43 sports, and 46 nations are entered, including the Asian Refugee Team. It is the third time Japan has hosted, after Tokyo in 1958 and Hiroshima in 1994.

Six sports make their Asian Games debut: freestyle BMX, mixed martial arts, padel, surfing, teqball and virtual taekwondo.

Two of those are worth pausing on. Teqball is played on a curved table with a football, using the rules of table tennis regarding touches and service but forbidding the hands. It was invented in Hungary in 2012, has an international federation and a world tour, and has spent a decade doing exactly what a new sport has to do to reach a multi-sport programme.

Virtual taekwondo is scored by sensors and motion capture rather than contact, with competitors striking in a marked area without touching each other. World Taekwondo has pushed it hard, partly as a route into events where the physical version is already established and partly as a hedge against the Olympic combat-sport quota.

Mixed martial arts is the more contentious inclusion, and padel the most commercially obvious, given how quickly its facility count has grown across Asia and the Gulf.

The organisers have also solved their accommodation problem unusually. Rather than build a village, they have chartered the cruise ship Costa Serena to house between four and five thousand athletes. Construction costs were the stated reason. No previous edition of the Games has done this, and it will be watched closely by every city weighing a bid against the cost of permanent housing it does not need afterwards.

The torch relay began on 18 August with around a thousand torchbearers.