Green calls for update

ATHLETICS Papua New Guinea president Tony Green has called on the PNG Games Council to provide an urgent update to all stakeholders on the status of this year’s event.
“There are only seven months to go to the Games and yet there is zero communication,” he said in a statement yesterday.
“In a PNG Games year, many sports would build their annual calendar of events around those Games, so any late changes can have significant consequences.
“Next year, we have the Pacific Mini Games in Saipan as well as the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
“So a major event towards the end of this year such as the PNG Games will be very important for selection purposes.
“The worst thing that can happen is that the Games are postponed again at short notice with the result being that some key sports will find they have a big hole in their calendars.
“We need a clear and unequivocal statement from the council that the Games are going ahead in Mendi in November and that all the facilities will be ready.”
“Not just facilities but equipment too.
“We don’t want a repeat of the situation in 2017 in Kimbe where we had a new track, but no equipment whatsoever was bought.
“To this day, equipment still hasn’t been bought.”
Green also called for national sporting bodies to be given more responsibility in future in staging the Games in their respective sports.
“The 2015 Pacific Games organising committee contracted individual sports in PNG to deliver the competition in their sport and this is a model used worldwide in staging multi-sport Games,” he said.
“The required technical expertise is within the Sports themselves, not within the host organising committee or PNG Sports Foundation.
“We’ve seen the same situation repeated in many PNG Games with a small office trying to do too much, especially with travel arrangements for technical officials.”