The City Athletics Federation will be established in Vitebsk

July 23, Vitebsk / Sergey Kotov - BELTA /. A city athletics federation will be established in Vitebsk to promote and develop the "queen of sports," Dmitry Skorynkin, head of the city executive committee's department for physical culture, sports and tourism, told a BELTA correspondent. Currently, seven educational and sports institutions of regional subordination are training athletes in the regional center, and 20 types of this popular sport have been developed in the city. The city federation is designed to become a unified center that will monitor and address issues of developing children's and youth sports, and assist in creating conditions for training reserves for the national and Belarusian teams, Dmitry Skorynkin noted. The establishment of such a public organization in the regional center will also allow for more effective solutions to other tasks aimed at involving the younger generation in sports, identifying talented children, and coordinating the activities of sports institutions. Organizational work on the creation of the city federation is planned to be completed in October of this year. In addition, to intensify the development of athletics in Vitebsk, it is planned to create a city sports school that will specialize in training athletes. In order to strengthen the material base of sports institutions, the issue of building an indoor athletics arena with a capacity of 3.5 thousand seats, meeting international standards, is being worked out. Today, the main centers for training and holding athletics competitions in the regional center are the indoor arena of the Olympic reserve school and the athletics core of the Vitebsk Central Sports Complex, the rental of which sports institutions do not always have sufficient financial resources for. In total, more than a thousand athletes are engaged in athletics in Vitebsk, and about 80 coaches train them. The national athletics team includes 30 athletes from the city, and in 2008, three representatives of the regional center took part in the XXIX Olympic Games in Beijing. Last year, 17 athletics competitions were held in Vitebsk with the participation of more than 5,000 athletes, 50 Vitebsk athletes fulfilled the qualification standards of master of sports, candidate for master of sports, and 1st category. The six best athletes receive a personal city scholarship in the amount of five base units. -0-