ISF President Visits Taiwan To Witness Softball Finals At World Games
ISF President – “There has been a special atmosphere here, just as in Beijing”
Kaohsiung (Taiwan); 20th July 2009: International Softball Federation President Don Porter has visited his third softball competition in a week after arriving in Taiwan to support the softball competition at the World Games and further promote the BackSoftball campaign for Olympic reinstatement.
Having attended the World Cup of Softball invitational tournament in Oklahoma, USA, Mr. Porter traveled to Saskatoon in Canada to watch the opening games of the ISF XII Men’s World Championship and then landed in Kaohsiung today.
The ISF president will watch today’s final games of the women’s fast pitch softball competition, which will wrap up the four-day tournament that included teams from Canada, Chinese Taipei, Japan, (South) Korea, Russia, and Singapore.
Unlike other international sports tournaments, the World Games focuses more on the concepts of friendship, community cooperation and unification with athletes demonstrating these concepts through sports, which fits in with the ideals softball promotes throughout the world.
The ISF president said, “This has been a great celebration of international softball and provides a further reminder of the importance of the game on a world sport landscape.
“This event has had very much the same sort of feel that we had at the Olympic Games in Beijing last summer, with large crowds getting into the spirit of the event and really making for a special atmosphere.
One of the founding members of the World Games, which started in 1982, Mr. Porter concluded, “I hope we can convince the International Olympic Committee in a few weeks that, while events like this are always going to be greatly important, the prospect of Olympic competition remains the peak of ambition for softball players.”
The 8th World Games, the world’s second largest international sports tournament, which continue until July 26, is bringing together almost 5,000 athletes from 105 countries. Softball is on the programme of approximately 15 different multi-sport Games.
Softball was first featured in the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996 and last year’s competition in Beijing was very successful with a total attendance close to 180,000 and a continuation of the sport’s excellent record of no positive doping tests at any of the four Summer Olympics that the sport has been a part of.
A final decision on which sports will be added to the current roster of 26 at the 2016 Summer Olympic Games will be made at the 121st IOC Session in Copenhagen in October this year.
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