The Indian Olympic Association (IOA) Secretary-General, Rajiv Mehta declared that the National Games 2022 will be conducted in multiple cities of Gujarat in September-October this year.
Earlier, the event was deferred several times because of different reasons, finally, IOA has decided to hold the event in the state of Gujarat following the Gujarat Olympic Association and the state government jointly enounce their interest to host the National Games.
“The Gujarat government wrote to us that it backs the expression of interest of the state Olympic Association to host the Games and we are happy to accept their proposal,” Mehta stated.
“The Games will be held in five or six cities in Gujarat, including Ahmedabad in September-October. The exact dates will be announced after a few days. We are happy that the Games will be held after a lot of delays,” he further said.
“We are also going to call a General Body Meeting to ratify some important decisions as well as the hosting of National Games. We are going to approach Delhi High Court and Supreme Court (where cases involving IOA are pending) to allow us to call a GBM,” Mehta added.
Kerala hosted the National Games, in 2015. After multiple delays in 2018 and 2019 due to of the state’s failure to generate proper infrastructure, the games were deferred to 2020. COVID-19 pandemic further delayed this process.
According to Mehta, Gujarat can easily give the needed infrastructure as the state already has top facilities for different sports. This would work as an upper hand for organizing these national games in a period of short time.
