(ATR) The Black Sea city of Trabzon, Turkey is the choice over four other cities to host the 2011 European Youth Olympic Festival.
The European Olympic Committees, meeting in Brussels this weekend, took four rounds of voting to elect Trabzon, which edged Utrecht, Netherlands for the victory.
Other cities in the contest: Herning, Denmark; Genoa, Italy; Riga, Latvia.
EOC President Patrick Hickey tells Around the Rings he believes the five-city race for the 2011 festival shows there is strong interest in the event, aimed at teenage athletes.
But he says the EOC also wants to protect the event from becoming too large and over-commercialized, which could exclude smaller cities from bidding for the festival.
Trabzon, in eastern Turkey, has a population about 250,000.
Trabzon proposes to use a single athletes village, which is one of the advantages offered by the Turkish bid. Room is needed for approximately 3,300 athletes and officials.
Trabzon will pose a transport challenge, according to the report of the evaluation commission of the EOC. Only 11 of the 48 members of the EOC have direct flights to Trabzon, and then only weekly. For other travelers connecting through Istanbul, the commission report says there may not be enough aircraft capacity to or from Trabzon to accommodate the EYOF.
The commission also flagged Trabzon for the distance between some venues, as much as 71 km apart on an east-west axis.
A total of nine sports are on the program for the festival.
Trabzon's budget for staging the five-day festival is 2.8 million euros. The construction budget is 10.3 million euros. Just over half of that figure is for the athlete village; 1.8 million is budgeted for an athletics track.
The Trabzon EYOF 2011 would take place July 24 to 29.
Belgrade is the host for the 2007 EYOF, which takes place July 21-28. The Winter version of festival takes place in Jaca, Spain February 18-23.
The 2009 festival hosts are Tampere, Finland for summer and Slask/Beskidy, Poland for winter.
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