Deaflympics Media Watch (16 November 2025)

Data collected 0900 JST 16-Nov-2025

The Games are underway — but you’d hardly know it from the world’s sports desks.

Today should have been the moment the headlines shifted from warm-up stories to actual competition: goals scored, medals won, shocks, heroics, heartbreak. Instead? Silence. And not the Deaf kind. The media kind.

Yes, the results exist. They’re sitting quietly on the official Tokyo 2025 website. They’re in federation match reports — like the USA Deaf Women smashing Japan 5–0, or the Ukrainian men putting five past the US team. They’re hidden in Japanese corporate updates and athlete sponsor pages. The wrestling brackets are fully up. The schedules are live. The data is there.

Japan Today reported on members of the imperial family in attendance at the Opening Ceremony. (Image: POOL via ZUMA press Wire)

But where are the stories?

Where is the mainstream “Day 1 at the Deaflympics”?
Where is the BBC Sport medal table ticker?
Where is the ESPN highlight reel?
Where is even one big newsroom saying “Here’s what happened today”?

This is the pattern we’re exposing: if a Deaf athlete wins, you have to dig through official PDFs and federation pages to find out. The world’s sports media aren’t telling the story. Not yet. Media access information

And that’s exactly why we’re watching.
Exactly why we’re documenting this gap.
Exactly why we’re doing this work.

Because the athletes are competing.
The results are happening.
The moments are real.
The coverage should be too.

Real sport with real results, ignored by real newsrooms.

All the details are here on the official Deaflympics2025 website

Live action via You Tube