Japan lost its bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympic Games, and now it has lost the president of the Japan Olympic Committee, who died Sunday night after collapsing at a hotel in western Japan.
Yushiro Yagi was in Osaka, about 250 miles from Tokyo, to attend a ceremony to disband the Osaka 2008 Olympic Bid Committee. The cause of his death was not immediately known.
Yagi served as the coach of Japan’s biathlon team in the 1972 Sapporo Winter Olympics and of a team of skiers at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics.
In 1999 he was elected JOC president and was re-elected in March. He led the Japanese Olympic delegates at the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics and at the 2000 summer Games in Sydney.
