The international athletics season will commence in earnest in exactly four weeks’ time when the first of the World Athletics Continental Tour Gold meetings is held at Turku in Finland.

Following a challenging start to the year, competition is starting to resume in many countries and the action will heat up on 11 August when Turku kicks off the inaugural World Athletics Continental Tour Gold series.

Continental Tour Gold meetings, the top tier of the world's best one-day competitions outside the Diamond League, will be held throughout August and September.

The series is scheduled to include stops in eight countries in total, including Hungary (Székesfehérvár, 19 Aug), Japan (Tokyo, 23 Aug), Poland (Silesia, 6 Sep), Czech Republic (Ostrava, 8 Sep), Croatia (Zagreb, 15 Sep), Kenya (Nairobi, 26 Sep) and China (Nanjing, date tbc).

The Kip Keino Classic, which will be hosted in Nairobi’s freshly refurbished Nyayo National Stadium, will attract many of the leading Kenyan athletes.

The next Youth Olympic Games (YOG), a sporting event for athletes aged 15 to 18, will take place in 2026 rather than 2022, announced the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Senegal. The IOC invokes in particular the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics to 2021 and "the operational and financial consequences of the global health crisis" to justify the delay in the first Games organized on the African continent.

The Wanda Diamond League today announced further alterations to its provisional 2020 calendar, with the cancellation of two meetings and a further event pushed back until September.

The 2020 editions of the following meetings have been cancelled:

Eugene

London

Paris

World Athletics and the International Athletics Foundation (IAF) announced that 193 athletes from 58 member federations will be offered one-time grants of US$3000 through an Athlete Welfare Fund announced in April to help support professional athletes experiencing financial hardship due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Initially totalling US$500,000 when its creation was announced on 28 April, generous contributions since have made US$600,000 ultimately available to athletes in need.

The Forum of the Media Committee for the Promotion of Athletics in West Africa (COMPPAOO) receives Friday, May 29, 2020 Fabrice Zango, from Burkina Faso, bronze medalist in the triple jump at the world athletics championships in Doha 2019.

The Tribune of the Media Committee for the Promotion of Athletics in West Africa (COMPAAO) receives Ivorian trainer Anthony Koffi on Friday 23 May 2020 at 4 p.m. GMT. The theme chosen is: "Athletes in the test of Covid-19 ".

Anthony Koffi has proven himself at the Dakar International Athletics Center (CIAD) by allowing the Botswana Amantle Montso to become world champion in the 400m. Anthony Koffi is also the coach of champion Ta Lou Marie Josée and Cissé Gué.

As of mid-August the athletic tracks will again receive runners' tips as part of the "Diamond League". A reorganized calendar has just been revealed by the organizers with the dates of the next meetings with the exception of those in Rabat and Zurich, which have been canceled. The new programming, in the context of Covid-19, will be extended over two months. On August 14, the first meeting of the season in Monaco opens, which will be immediately followed by those of Gateshead, August 16 and Stockholm. In September return to competition with the meeting in Lausanne on the 2nd, that of Paris on the 4th, Rome on the 17th and Shanghai on the 19th. To close this particular season, the Diamond League will take up residence in Eugene on October 04, in Doha on 09 October and in a city yet to be confirmed in China on October 17. It will be the last stage of this season which, as we can see, will not go to Rabat as in previous years. A decision of the organizers who also eliminated the finals from Zurich.

The Pan-African body proposed this date in correspondence made public a few days ago.

No official date has yet been set for the holding of the African Athletics Championships planned for Cameroon in 2022. At present, we still do not know precisely when the city of Yaounde will host the 23rd edition of this continental competition.

However, after a consultation meeting between the heads of the technical department of the Confederation Africaine d'Athletisme (CAA), Lamine Faty, the director general of this pan-African body, proposed the date from 2 to 6 June 2022

The Wanda Diamond League suspended a further two meetings in June as it continues to adapt the 2020 season calendar in the face of the coronavirus crisis, while Oslo’s Bislett Games are to be staged in an alternative format.

In recent weeks, the Wanda Diamond League has been forced to suspend a number of its early-season meetings as a result of health and logistical concerns brought about by the global coronavirus crisis.

Today the series announced the postponement of further meetings in Eugene (scheduled for 7 June) and Paris (13 June).

The Bislett Games also announced plans to host an alternative athletics competition, an exhibition event dubbed 'The Impossible Games', on 11 June, the original date of this year’s Oslo Diamond League meeting.

European championships canceled

The European Athletics Championships, initially scheduled from 25 to 30 August in Paris, will not take place due to the health situation. They were canceled, not postponed to 2021.