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IOC's Bach hails YOG as great opportunity to educate young athletes

Xinhua, February 12, 2016 Adjust font size:

International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach on Thursday praised the upcoming Lillehammer Winter Youth Olympic Games in Norway as "a great opportunity" to educate young athletes.

"The stage is set for the young athletes and hopefully also for the many spectators and the visitors to this Youth Olympic Games," Bach told a press conference just hours before the opening ceremony of the 2nd Winter Youth Olympic Games will be held in Lillehammer.

A total of 1,100 young athletes from the age of 14 to 18 from about 70 National Olympic Committees will compete in 70 medal events during the Games from Feb. 12 to 21 in Norwegian cities of Lillehammer, Hamar, Gjovik, Oyer and Oslo.

The Games are "a great opportunity to, in the one hand, inform and educate the young athletes, but also to make obvious what athletes and what the sports are doing for the society," Bach said. "Therefore the Learn and Share program is very important and innovative."

The Learn and Share program provides activities for the young athletes to learn together in workshops, which will focus on Olympism, skills development, well-being, social lifestyle and a healthy lifestyle among other topics.

In collaboration, they will also have much to learn from each other across borders, cultures, languages and sport disciplines.

During the 10-day events, 200 young leaders of sports from all over Norway will also be trained for their responsibilities during the Games and for future contributions to their own sports.

The IOC chief praised the young leaders in their latest efforts to address the refugee crisis and reiterated IOC's support for refugee athletes.

"This refugee crisis will not be solved by our generation. This challenge of such a magnitude will have to be solved by the next generation of these young leaders," Bach said.

He said the IOC has been cooperating with UN agencies to support sports facilities and sports programs in many refugee camps around the world and making efforts to help refugee athletes to continue to train and go to follow their Olympic dreams.

The IOC has already pledged two million U.S dollars to help refugees and will also invite some refugee athletes as a team to march into the stadium at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and participate on an equal stand with other athletes, Bach said.

He said the 2nd Winter Youth Olympic Games is a "great legacy" and hoped more cities in other countries will follow Lillehamer to be candidates for winter games.

"The Games will be a great opportunity for Lillehammer and Norway to refresh and modernize the great legacy of the Lillehammer Olympic Games (in 1994) have left here," Bach said.

The venues from the 1994 winter Olympic Games in Lillehammer will be reused for the events in 2016 as reuse is an important part of the Youth Olympic Games.

The Youth Olympic Games was established on April 25, 2007 on the initiative of the former IOC President Jacques Rogge. The vision of the Games is to encourage young people around the world to practice sport, raise awareness of Olympism and encourage them to adopt the values of Olympism and disseminate the message of the Olympic Movement around them.

The first Winter Youth Olympic Games was held in Innsbruck, Austria, in January, 2012. Endit