(ATR) The EOC president is to meet Pope Francis this week ahead of a Baku 2015 European Games debrief in Rome.
Pat Hickey has been asked to sit on a committee to help the Vatican prepare for a 2016 convention called Sport and Faith: Sport at the Service of Humanity.
The IOC Executive Board member will meet briefly with Pope Francis on Thursday before the advisory committee gets down to business.
Around the Rings understands that other IOC members are participating in the two-day meeting. ANOC president Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, Prince Feisal Al Hussein, founder and chairman of Generations for Peace, and Mario Pescante will bring their views to the table.
The committee will discuss how sport and faith can come together to promote common goals and set some clear objectives for the convention, which is being organized by the Vatican’s culture minister Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi.
ATR is told that it will be a "major Vatican event not exclusively Catholic but open to all faiths". No date for the convention is fixed but it is expected to take place in autumn next year.
Later on Friday, Hickey will break from the Vatican committee to lead the EOC’s debrief of the 2015 European Games, which runs through Saturday.
Baku 2015 CEO Simon Clegg and Azad Rahimov, Azerbaijan’s sports minister and chair of the organizing committee, will be among senior representatives of all major Games stakeholders involved in the meeting.
Hickey will also present an update on bidding for the 2019 European Games. Last month, the EOC chief told ATR that the European Olympic Committees was in "heavy negotiations" with two cities in one Eastern European nation to stage the 2019 edition.
Hickey has a busy week ahead. After the debrief, he travels to Montenegro and then on to Albania where the EOC Executive Committee convenes in Tirana on Sept. 17.
Reported by Mark Bisson
20 Years at #1: Your best source of news about the Olympics is AroundTheRings.com, for subscribers only.
Últimas Noticias
Sinner-Alcaraz, the duel that came to succeed the three phenomenons
Beyond the final result, Roland Garros left the feeling that the Italian and the Spaniard will shape the great duel that came to help us through the duel for the end of the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic era.
Table tennis: Brazil’s Bruna Costa Alexandre will be Olympic and Paralympic in Paris 2024
She is the third in her sport and the seventh athlete to achieve it in the same edition; in Santiago 2023 she was the first athlete with disabilities to compete at the Pan American level and won a medal.
Rugby 7s: the best player of 2023 would only play the medal match in Paris
Argentinian Rodrigo Isgró received a five-game suspension for an indiscipline in the circuit’s decisive clash that would exclude him until the final or the bronze match; the Federation will seek to make the appeal successful.
Rhonex Kipruto, owner of the world record for the 10000 meters on the road, was suspended for six years
The Kenyan received the maximum sanction for irregularities in his biological passport and the Court considered that he was part of a system of “deliberate and sophisticated doping” to improve his performance. He will lose his record and the bronze medal at the Doha World Cup.
Katie Ledecky spoke about doping Chinese swimmers: “It’s difficult to go to Paris knowing that we’re going to compete with some of these athletes”
The American, a seven-time Olympic champion, referred to the case of the 23 positive controls before the Tokyo Games that were announced a few weeks ago and shook the swimming world. “I think our faith in some of the systems is at an all-time low,” he said.
