Simon Geschke might soon be allowed to fly the coop from his Tokyo quarantine after missing out on the Olympic road race due to a positive COVID-19 test. The German has been confined to his hotel room for nearly a week but a follow-up test on Wednesday came back negative.
"We hope that he can leave Tokyo on Sunday," said Dirk Schimmelpfennig of the German press agency. "We assume that the second test will show a similar picture."
Geschke travelled from the Tour de France directly to Tokyo and trained with his teammates Nikias Arndt, Emanuel Buchmann and Max Schachmann two days before the men's Olympic road race but tested positive the following day. The rest of the team tested negative and were cleared to compete.
The 35-year-old, however, was forced to miss the race, writing that he was "more then disappointed to miss the Olympics" and called it "a dark day in my career".
Since then, he has posted photos that confirmed complaints from other Olympic athletes in quarantine, that the windows are locked, quarantined athletes can only leave the room three times a day and wrote that there is a "speaker on the room['s] ceiling to wake you up at 7am to check your temperature".
"Fair to say that this is (hopefully) the closest I will ever get to being in prison," Geschke said, adding a photo of bowls of plain white rice with steamed meat and vegetables and calling the food "pretty basic".
His living situation improved over the week with the delivery of some rollers so he could ride as well as extra food. Geschke posted a video of himself riding the rollers while watching his teammates racing the men's individual time trial.
The Olympic road events went off without further COVID-19 positives among the athletes, however the Spanish coach also went into quarantine after testing positive for the virus this week.
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation in March of 2020 and is the first such designation since the H1N1 flu spread across the world in 2009. The SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19's severe respiratory disease has killed over 4 million people around the world as of posting.
