Doha: The Qatar Paralympic Committee (QPC) yesterday held its 7th annual Special Needs Sports Festival in cooperation with the Qatar Olympic Committee’s Active Qatar Campaign, at the Abdullah bin Suhaim hall in the Qatar Sports Club.
The Festival celebrated Doha’s hosting of the 2015 IPC Athletics World Championships from October 22 to 31– the largest Paralympic event ever to be hosted in the Middle East.
Qatar aims to use its hosting of the IPC Athletics World Championships to increase opportunities for people with a disability to participate in sport, to raise the profile of disability sport and to spread awareness across Qatar and the whole of the Middle East.
The staging of the 7th Special Needs Sports Festival is fully aligned with those goals and the large turnout of schoolchildren from across Qatar shows the legacy that the Championships are already starting to create.
The IPC Athletics World Championships will be hosted in the 12,000 capacity Qatar Sports Club’s Suhaim Bin Hamad Stadium and will feature around 1,300 athletes from 90 countries. They will be one of the last major competitions before the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games and will act as a key qualifying competition for those Games. Over 500 students from more than 50 schools and special needs centers across Qatar took part in the Special Needs Sports Festival, which aims to raise awareness of people with special needs as well as giving them an outlet to showcase their skills and abilities by taking part in various sporting activities.
With a focus on fun rather than fierce competition, the Special Needs Festival saw a variety of activities held for people with intellectual disabilities, visual impairment and motor disability. Such activities included hurdle races, athletics, hockey as well as a litany of recreational events.
Commenting on the Special Needs Sports Festival, Deputy Chief Executive of the Doha 2015 Organising Committee and Executive Director of the Qatar Paralympic Committee, Ameer Al Mulla said: “It was incredible seeing so many of our students excited about the IPC Athletics World Championships. The Special Needs Sports Festival, along with the World Championships, is a perfect opportunity for us to raise the profile of Paralympic sports in the Qatar as well as in the entire region. It is our sincere hope that the Championships will inspire all the students here today to make sport an integral part of their future lives.” THE PENINSULA
