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International Day of Sport: a relay all over the world to promote the values of sport

13 huhtikuu 2022 liike-elämä

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To participate in the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace on 6 April 2022, the association Paris 2024 and its label Terre de jeux 2024 organised a 24-hour sporting relay which will pass through all continents and all time zones, in collaboration with the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs. The event aimed at raising the general public’s awareness about the values of sports and creating bridges between peoples.

Under the patronage of the United Nations, April 6th has become the International Day of Sport for Development and Peace. The aim of this Day is to acknowledge the positive role of sports and physical activity in everyday life and celebrate each year the contribution of sports in the major challenges of humankind: solidarity, inclusion, social relationships, education and health. The association Paris 2024 that supervises the next Olympic Games in Paris in 2024, committed to promote the social role of sports in various programmes in France and abroad by creating the label Terre de jeux 2024. And the association actively participated in this Day as part of this!

The first initiative of its kind

“Sport has the power to align our passion, energy and enthusiasm around a collective cause”, said the UN Deputy Secretary-General. “It is in our collective interest to harness the tremendous power of sport to help build a better and more sustainable future for all.” And this is precisely the spirit in which Paris 2024 and the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs offered to “celebrate the power of sport to bring people together, through an unprecedented initiative”, a 24-hours relay race.

In 44 countries, embassies and local authorities and overseas territories bearing the Terre de Jeux 2024 label organised an unprecedented sport event. The aim of the Terre de Jeux 2024 label is to “share the energy” of the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games with all the territories, municipalities, departments, regions, in mainland France and overseas, as well as the French embassies around the world, in order to “make sport a part of the daily life of all French people”.

A 22,000 kilometre loop

Over 8,000 participants, including people with disabilities, took part in this worldwide relay, covering a distance of more than 22,000 kilometres and practising 30 sports.

Spanning all continents and time zones, the relay around the globe started in Fiji, in the Pacific, then crossed Oceania, Asia, Europe, Africa and America, before returning and finishing in the Pacific, in French Polynesia.
Throughout the day, explains the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, each embassy and community organised a one-hour sporting event, which was launched at 9am (local time). Once the race was over, the relay was passed on to the embassies and communities in the next time zone through social networks.

It should be noted that various events (exhibitions, sports activities, round tables) were organised alongside the relay to highlight the unifying role of sport. As the ministry emphasises, sport is a “bridge between peoples” and “one of the last human activities capable of breaking the glass walls of different languages, cultures and interests”.

26 medals in Beijing

It is in this sporting context and in the same vein that the President of the French Republic paid tribute, on 29 March, to the “great French Olympic and Paralympic family, which held its own” during the Beijing Olympic Games. France won 26 medals (14 Olympic and 12 Paralympic), during these last Olympic Games, “an extraordinary adventure that is an epic in red, white and blue colours”, in the words of Emmanuel Macron.

French President Macron greeted each athlete individually in his speech, “taking part in the Games is an honour that must be served, a dream that must be seized, and you have done it”. Macron added that “this Olympic commitment has a road ahead of it and, on this road, the 2024 event is a formidable catalyst for action in the four corners of French Olympism to better support and recognise our athletes and to continue to establish the place of sport in the daily life of our country”.