Bear seen at Olympic softball stadium before opener

A bear appears to have ignored the ban on spectators at the Olympics.

Japanese media reported a bear was seen by guards early Wednesday at Fukushima Azuma Baseball Stadium before Japan and Australia's softball teams met in the opening event of the Olympics.

Fukushima is about 150 miles north of the main Olympic sites in Tokyo. Local media reported it was an Asian black bear.

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“I woke up to text messages asking, is this real? There's a big black bear, saying that it got on the field, it got in the area and it's on the loose. And I felt, what? This is crazy. No way," shortstop Amanda Chidester said after singling in the run in the Americans' 1-0 win over Canada on Thursday.

"And then one of the girls on our team said: 'Yeah, did you hear about the bear? It was on the news.' So I was able to report back to my family and say it was, in fact, true, that there was a bear in the area.”

There was no sighting of the bear during either Wednesday or Thursday's tripleheader.

“As we were driving up today, we were actually looking to see if we could find another bear,” US coach Ken Eriksen said.