Israel is preparing for one of the largest sports gatherings ever to be staged in Israel, the 12th Hapoel Games, Isaac Ofek, chairman of the Hapoel Games Organizing Committee in Israel, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
More than 3,500 athletes from 30 countries, including Israel, will participate in the Games from May I to May 8, Ofek said. The Games will feature 23 championships and invitation events along with exhibition performances in 87 locations in cities, towns and kibbutzim throughout Israel.
The opening ceremony will be held in Jaffa’s Bloomfield Stadium, with President Yitzhak Navon making his almost last public appearance in office. Premier Menachem Begin is expected to attend the closing ceremony in Haifa.
Participants from abroad, most of them Jews but including many non-Jewish world champions, will be coming from Western countries as well as from Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia, Ofek said that the Asian Sports Federation was hard at work to bar Asian participation, and “I fear they may succeed, ” he said.
The visiting sports competitors, their team leaders and officials, will be housed in six “Olympic villages” in the Tel Aviv-Netanya area according to sports categories rather than by nationality, Ofek said. This arrangement, he noted, will ensure integration among the competitors on the basis of their skills and enhance efficiency in travelling to their venues.
PREPARING SOME 140,000 MEALS
The visiting athletes will partake in approximately 140,000 meals served in six locations. A committee of Israeli chefs has prepared a special diet of 3,500 calories daily to suit the participants.
For the first time in Israel, results will be reported by a computer system. As in Olympic competitions, a committee will check all athletes to make certain that they are not taking drugs to enhance their performances. A total of 1,100 officials will handle the organization and judging of the hundreds of slated events and trials.
Ofek said that there will be a variety of events each evening in the different Olympic villages. Twenty-four official receptions will be held, by the Israel Olympic Committee, Israel’s various sports federations, municipal governments in which competitions take place, the Histadrut, and the embassies of competing delegations.
One of the outstanding features of the Hapoel Games will be a six-day bicycling event from Dan to Beersheba, with 50 competitors from six countries racing 100 kilometers each day.
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