Kuwait City, Kuwait, February 27, 2023: The Olympic Council of Asia has announced that 44 National Olympic Committees will send representatives for the two-day OCA Athletes Forum in Bangkok next month.
“We are pleased to announce that 44 NOCs will be sending 89 participants for the OCA Athletes Forum which will be held in cooperation with Olympic Solidarity,” said Tony Tarraf, OCA Head of Athletes Development Department and Special Projects.
“We made it mandatory for the NOCs to send one female and one male representative and I’m happy to see they have all complied. There will be 46 male and 43 female participants,” Tarraf noted.
The OCA Athletes Committee Chair, Mikako Kotani, and Vice Chair Tayyab Ikram will spearhead the two-day forum to be held over the weekend of Saturday and Sunday, March 18-19 at the Centara Grand Hotel at CentralWorld, Bangkok.
Olympic Solidarity will be represented by Olivier Niamkey, while the IOC Athletes’ Commission will be represented by its Chair, Emma Terho. Also attending are IOC Athletes’ Department Director Kaveh Mehrabi and fellow members Artur Milroy and Karen Dolphin.
The IOC Athletes’ Commission members participating in the forum, which is designed to help support Athlete Committees in Asia, include Ryu Seung Min, Masomah Ali Zada, Abhinav Bindra, Nadin Dawani, Zhang Hong and Yuki Ota. They are all Olympians.
The comprehensive two-day programme will start with a video message from IOC President Dr. Thomas Bach and include presentations from the OCA Athletes Committee, IOC Athletes’ Commission, Olympic Solidarity and the Athlete Centred Project Fund.
Participants will also engage in workshops and panel discussions on a wide range of topics including prevention of the manipulation of competitions, athlete career development for sport and beyond, fight against doping, and how to run effective athletes’ commissions.
This will be the first OCA Athletes Forum since November 2018 in Tokyo and will come at the start of a busy OCA year for National Olympic Committees with the 19th Asian Games in Hangzhou, China from September 23 to October 8 and the 6th Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games in Bangkok and Chonburi province from November 17-26.