(ATR) The first edition of the new World Beach Games will present its final Sports program and schedules this Thursday, May 24 in San Diego.
The city’s South Mission Beach has been named as the site of this Olympic-level event scheduled for October 10-15th, 2019. Nearly 2,000 athletes are expected to compete from about 100 countries.
The Games are a creation of ANOC but rely for their organization mainly on the San Diego Exploratory Foundation, a non-profit organization led by the city’s community leaders.
Its founder and now the Games CEO is Vince Mudd. In a recent interview with Around the Rings, Mudd said he felt confident that the city of San Diego can perfectly handle the inaugural World Beach Games.
"This (Beach Games) is not an event that is out of scale to what the city puts on, on a regular basis and the location, one of the advantages, is that all disciplines will be played on that same part of the beach. From the transportation standpoint, once you get to the site, you don’t have to get to your car again, you can walk which helps us mitigating major transportation risks. Our biggest concern is having the best athletes in the world," said Mudd.
According to him, so far all the International Federations are working towards having their best athletes in San Diego for these World Beach Games. In fact, ANOC is going to have its annual assembly in San Diego days before the start of the games with 1800 delegates expected to attend.
Additionally Mudd predicts that the event is going to attract an estimated 45,000 people daily for the six-day duration of the Beach Games.
The World Beach Games include 15 sports with 17 disciplines: beach soccer, volleyball, wrestling, handball, karate; surfing and standup paddling; waterskiing and wakeboarding; 3-on-3 basketball; BMX cycling; kite surfing; aquatics (swimming); doubles tennis; park skateboard; sport climbing and bouldering; and duathlon (running and swimming).
The venues for the games will have to be built on temporary structures especially for the action sports program which will take place on a beach parking lot where disciplines such as skateboarding, BMX, wall climbing, and the 3-on-3 basketball tournament will take place. Other venues will be built on the sand and will require two 2500-seat stadiums. The rest of the venues are simply to be located near the ocean for the water sports.
San Diego seems to be completely supportive of these Beach Games. In fact, according to Mudd, residents of the city want to seize the moment.
"We are talking about a community that understands how to welcome international visitors, so getting the community amped up and ready to support these games is outstanding," explained Mudd.
More than $40 million in sponsorships are expected to pour in for these World Beach Games that were awarded to San Diego in 2015. Originally planned to take place in 2017, the event had to be rescheduled after bumping into planning and fundraising issues.
Mudd says that ANOC will give preference to the Olympic TOP sponsors to choose whether they want to get involved in these event despite the fact that the Olympic Rings won’t be used. There are sponsorship categories that the Beach Games will exclude, among them spirits, cigarettes and medicinal marijuana even though it is legal in the state of California.
These first Beach Games are also going to be tied to a theme pertaining to the environment. In San Diego they want to this event to be known as "The WaterCon Games" where issues such as water quality issues or access to water quality on a global level are discussed.
"The culture, the clean water, the clean games and great sports. That’s what we are going to be focusing on," concluded Mudd.
ANOC hopes the second games will be held in 2021 and every two years thereafter, between winter and summer Olympic Games, and in cities and countries that cannot afford to put on full-fledged Olympic events.
Written by Javier Monne
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