Greece wants permanent hosting of IOC presidential vote
Baku, April 6, AZERTAC
Greece wants to permanently host the election of new International Olympic Committee (IOC) presidents in ancient Olympia, the Greek Olympic chief said in an interview on Feb 26.
“My dream is to have this election in ancient Olympia, to remind everybody where the Games started, 2,800 years ago,” Hellenic Olympic Committee president Spyros Capralos told AFP.
“Every eight or 12 years to organise the election of the IOC president in ancient Olympia, this is something that is feasible.
“I think that overall it would give positive vibes to everybody in the Olympic movement.”
Greece is scheduled to host the next IOC presidential election in March 2025, when the term of current IOC president Thomas Bach ends.
Bach, a German fencing gold medal winner at the 1976 Montreal Games, was elected in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires in 2013.
Under Olympic tradition, ancient Olympia on April 16 will also host the flame-lighting ceremony for the torch relay of the Paris 2024 Games, which will be held from July 26 to Aug 11.
Ten days later, at the ceremony to hand over the flame to Paris organisers, Greek Nana Mouskouri, one of the world’s best-selling recording artists, will be invited to perform, Capralos added.
“We hope in the handover ceremony that Nana Mouskouri will be able to come to sing the national anthems,” he said.
“That would be a very special moment, because Nana Mouskouri is somebody very well-respected and very well-known in France and Greece, but also all around Europe and the world.”
Mouskouri, who has sold more than 350 million albums globally, turns 90 in October.
Though officially retired for over a decade, she gave a number of performances to promote her album Forever Young in 2018.
In other Olympic news, the French Olympic Committee said on Feb 26 that it would provide hotel rooms for breastfeeding French athletes during the Paris Olympics because children are set to remain barred from the athletes’ village in the suburbs of the French capital.
The move is a response to demands by new mothers, notably France’s 31-year-old judo star Clarisse Agbegnenou, that parenting be taken into greater consideration by sporting bodies.
Breastfeeding French sportswomen will be offered rooms at a hotel a short distance from the athletes’ village, where they can sleep with their infants or have their fathers look after them, said French Olympic Committee secretary-general Astrid Guyart.
Olympic rules mean children can be given passes to enter the athletes’ village under exceptional circumstances, Guyart explained, but the passes are “very restricted”.
A social area for families will also be created at the hotel, she added, with the total cost estimated to be around €40,000 (S$58,300).
“It’s unprecedented and it’s something we want to become permanent, so that’s not a one-off because it’s the Olympics in Paris,” said Guyart.
Around 10,000 sportsmen and women are expected to sleep at the athletes’ village, which has been specially built in the deprived northern Paris suburb of Saint-Ouen.
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