Tokyo’s ambition to host the 2020 Olympic Games was endorsed by Japanese athletics chiefs and Olympians yesterday, as the nation looks to spur recovery from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disasters.

The Japanese Olympic Committee (JOC) brought together 60 athletes and sporting officials to call on Tokyo’s metropolitan government to formally enter the city for the 2020 Games.

The city’s governor, Shintaro Ishihara, last week said he would bid for Tokyo’s second Olympics – the first was in 1964 – to drive Japan’s recovery from the March 11 natural disasters and ensuing nuclear crisis.

Tokyo is expected to formally announce its candidacy to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) next month and will find out if it has won in September 2013. Tokyo lost its bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio de Janeiro.

“It will serve national interests that the people of the nation unite as one to bid for the Olympics as a symbol of recovery from the Great East Japan Earthquake,” JOC president Tsunekazu Takeda said in the group’s meeting with the governor.

Takeda said that the JOC was considering staging Olympic football matches in the disaster-hit northeast region if the Games bid was successful.

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