North Korea, citing the pandemic, will skip the Tokyo Olympics.

The North Koreans at the closing ceremony for the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.Credit...Edgar Su/ReutersNorth Korea said on Tuesday that it had decided not to participate in the 32nd Tokyo Summer Olympics because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The decision was made when the North’s national Olympic Committee met on March 25 in Pyongyang, where it decided a delegation would skip the Tokyo Olympics, to be held on July 23 to Aug. 8, “in order to protect our athletes from the global health crisis caused by the malicious virus infection,” the Sports in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a government-run website, said.

It is the first Summer Olympics that the North has skipped…