August 5 Tokyo 2020 Olympics news and results

Tokyo 2020 is turning into a battle for bragging rights between Team USA and the Aussies.

The US and Australia are facing off against each other in four different team sports in three days, an unusual coincidence due to both nations' strong performance in those events.

The Americans took round one when the US women's basketball team beat the Australians in the quarterfinals.

Thursday will see both country's men's basketball teams play each other in the semifinals. Then the Australian and American women's football teams will face off in that competition's bronze medal match.

The new rivalry concludes (for now) with beach volleyball on Friday morning, when Australians Taliqua Clancy and Mariafe Artacho del Solar take on Americans April Ross and Alix Klineman.

Australian Keegan Palmer won the gold medal in the men's park, the final skateboarding event during the sport's inaugural Olympic competition.

Palmer turned in two incredible runs of his three tries, scoring 94.04 and 95.83 out of 100. Each of those would have been a high enough score to win gold.

Brazil's Pedro Barros won silver with an 86.14 and the US' Cory Juneau took bronze with 84.13.

This was the only skateboarding competition in which Japan didn't win. The Olympic host took five of the 12 medals handed out in Tokyo.

The wait is over.

India's men's hockey team — the most successful in the history of the Olympics with eight gold medals — is finally back on the podium at the Games.

The team claimed bronze with a 5-4 victory over Germany at the Oi Hockey Stadium in Tokyo on Thursday to end a winless run stretching back to Moscow 1980, when they won the last of their golds.

There were tears and hugs on the field after the match as the players and their Australian coach Graham Reid celebrated the historic moment.

Team India has won four medals at Tokyo 2020 overall and is aiming to surpass its best Olympic haul of six medals at London 2012.

Despite being the world's second-most populous country, a lack of funding and proper infrastructure have prevented India from becoming an Olympic powerhouse.

At the same time, many athletes choose to play cricket, a non-Olympic sport that enjoys much bigger fanfare in the subcontinent. However, the number of Indian Olympians has, in recent years, risen steadily as the government invests more in sports and athletics.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted to congratulate the team on their win.

We're heading into the final weekend of competition at the Olympics. As the Games draw to a close, here's what you need to know from Tokyo.

A "new phase" of the pandemic: Though the Olympics have, by and large, gone about as well as could be hoped for a major sporting competition held in the middle of a pandemic, the situation off the pitch and outside Tokyo 2020's many venues appears dire.

Nishimura said the more infectious Delta variant accounts for about 90% of all cases in the Tokyo metropolitan area.

Olympic organizers and Japan's leaders, including Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, have previously said they do not believe the Olympics have contributed to the surge in cases.

But some medical professionals and public health experts disagree. They see people gathering outside venues like Tokyo's Olympic Stadium and worry that a corresponding, post-Games spike in Covid-19 cases is coming — a potential catastrophe considering just how overburdened the country's medical infrastructure is.

Karate's debut: Japan's most famous martial art made its Olympic bow on Thursday, with competition scheduled to go late into the evening. The first of nine medal bouts starts at 7:30 p.m. Tokyo time (6:30 a.m. ET).

Karate's inclusion in the Olympics is set to be short-lived, as the event was excluded from the Paris 2024 Games' program.

NBA stars face-off: Today's basketball games determine who plays for gold on Saturday in Japan. Kevin Durant, Damian Lillard and the rest of Team USA's star-studded roster take on Australia. The Boomers, led by NBA veterans Patty Mills and Joe Ingles, surprised the basketball world by beating the Americans in exhibition play last month. That game is followed by France vs. Slovenia, which will see the NBA's three-time defensive player of the year, Rudy Gobert, take on Luka Doncic, one of basketball's brightest young stars.

Medal update: China leads the way with 32 gold medals, followed by the United States with 27 and Japan with 21. Team USA has 83 total medals to top the combined leaderboard. China is second with 71 and the Russian Olympic Committee is third with 53.

What else is coming later in Japan:

The full Olympic schedule can be found here.

Simone Biles has tweeted thanks to a Japanese gym for allowing her to privately train while she attempted to regain her gold medal form after withdrawing during the women's artistic gymnastics team final at the Summer Olympics.

While thanking those at the Juntendo University in a Wednesday tweet, Biles retweeted a story first published in The Wall Street Journal. The report says Biles and her team asked the facility if she could discretely use the gym in an attempt to overcome her struggle with "the twisties," a mental block in gymnastics where competitors lose track of their positioning midair.

The Wall Street Journal reported that university professor Kazuhiro Aoki got a phone call about 12 hours after Biles removed herself from the team final, asking to use the school's gym for a "gymnast."

According to the report, during a four-day period, Biles practiced for hours behind locked doors working on moves she previously performed with precision.

Last week, Biles posted a series of videos on her Instagram account showing the 4-time Olympic gold medal winner struggling to find her form and crashing into landing pads while practicing dismounts on the uneven bars.

Biles said Wednesday she would "forever be thankful" to Juntendo "for allowing me to come train separately to try to get my skills back."

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Another day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics is in the books. If you're just reading in now, here are some of the highlights and key storylines from Wednesday's Games:

Tokyo is considered one of the world's top food cities, drawing travelers from around the world who spend their days sampling renowned Japanese dishes, from sushi to ramen.

But for those who flew into the city to compete or work at the Tokyo Olympics, most local restaurants are off limits.

While Japan is still closed to international travelers, the athletes, coaches and journalists permitted to enter the country for the Games have to follow a strict set of safety rules and are not permitted to leave the vicinity of their accommodation for a 14-day period unless approved for an exception.

Luckily, Japan's 24-hour convenience stores, many of which are attached to hotels, are arguably the best in the world and offer an unbelievable array of foods and drinks.

Ask anyone who has traveled to Japan and they will likely have a story about a memorable visit to a konbini — the abbreviated name for convenience stores in Japanese.

Thanks to a series of social media posts from journalists and athletes, they've been pushed into the limelight at the Tokyo Olympic Games not just for their fine offerings but for their top-notch customer service as well.

Case in point: 7-Eleven came to the rescue after a sports reporter for Canada's CBC network in Tokyo called out for help on her Twitter account. The issue? She wanted to learn the correct way to unwrap a package of onigiri, a Japanese rice ball.

The post, featuring a video of Anastasia Bucsis failing to open her onigiri without tearing apart the exterior seaweed, gained 82.2k likes and was retweeted over 34.6k times since being posted on July 27.

In response, 7-Eleven Japan posted a how-to video explaining the correct way to open the cleverly designed packages on its Twitter account.

"Today, we would like to introduce how to open a package film of rice ball for the customers who are visiting Japan from overseas," the post said.

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By Maggie Hiufu Wong, CNN

With three gold medals from three events, Tokyo's Ariake Urban Sports Park has been a home from home for Japanese skateboarders at the Tokyo Olympics.

Sakura Yosozumi was the latest to top the podium as park skating's first ever Olympic champion, while her teammate, Kokona Hiraki, made history of her own as the youngest medalist since 1936 at the age of 12 years and 343 days.

Of the nine skateboarding medals handed out in Tokyo — the first time the sport has featured in the Olympic program — Japan has won five of them.

Another theme to emerge from skateboarding's Olympic debut is success for some of the Games' youngest ever competitors.

Great Britain's Sky Brown, 13, claimed the bronze medal in Wednesday's park skating competition with her last run of the day. It meant the three skaters on the podium had a combined aged of 44 — two years more than the medalists in last week's women's street final.

With an English father and a Japanese mother, Brown says she also "really feels at home" in Tokyo, though she discredited the idea that youth is a prerequisite for skateboarding success.

Olympic spirit: Brown said her last-ditch attempt to get into the podium positions with the penultimate run of the final was spurred by an encouraging word from Yosozumi that helped the Briton land the kickflip indy she had missed on the previous two runs.

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