With 50 days to go until the International Olympic Committee (IOC) vote on the 2018 Youth Olympic Games (YOG) host, Glasgow’s young people are leading the final push for the city’s Bid to host a Games with global impact.
Glasgow is demonstrating its ability to mobilise the world’s youth by aiming to engage around one million young people across the UK by decision day on July 4. Hundreds of thousands have already been contacted through social media, schools, youth and community organisations and charities.
Leading this engagement are the Bid’s 2018 Young Champions, Jasmine Main and Mahad Ahmed, who this week are launching new blogs on the 2018 website and social media platforms. 17-year-old Glasgow School of Sport athlete Mahad, and Jasmine, an 18-year-old drama student and National Theatre of Scotland Champion, will post regular updates along with young champions from all over the country.
Glasgow’s vision for the 2018 YOG is founded on Scotland and the UK’s unrivalled track record as strong, stable partners for delivering world-class multi-sports events, and a city with a global reputation as a sporting and cultural powerhouse with young people at its heart.
The city has pledged that the Glasgow 2018 YOG, in partnership with the IOC, will enable the Olympic Movement to achieve lasting global impact by engaging with millions of young people.
As well as reaching every school pupil in Glasgow and around 26,000 schools across the UK, the Bid Team have engaged with young people through Facebook, where 70 per cent of the Bid’s 44,000 followers are under 24. A national network of sportscotland’s school champions, along with youth charity National Young Scot, are also promoting the Bid across Scotland.
Jasmine, who hosted the launch of the Bid last year, said: “All the way along this Bid young people have led the way whether it was achieving a world-first by launching the Bid with only young people presenting the event, or when Mahad and I took Glasgow’s Candidature File to the IOC Headquarters in Switzerland in October last year.
“It has been such an exciting year for all of us and I can’t wait to share all our experiences with young people like me to show how we can stage the most fantastic YOG in 2018 in our home city which is friendly, safe and loads of fun.”
Mahad, currently ranked Number One triple jumper in his age group in Scotland, said: “Every single young person should back this Bid because it will open up so many great opportunities for all of us. It doesn’t matter whether you want to be an athlete, an actress like Jasmine, or anything else because this Bid is all about showing everyone that we can be champions in our own lives whatever we want to be, and if Glasgow wins we can connect with kids all over the world to share experiences, learn and have fun.”
Glasgow 2018 Bid Director, Paul Bush, said: “Young people have embraced this Bid in exactly the way we had hoped. Through the city’s already extensive ways of communicating with its young people, as well as through a whole range of social media channels, we are reaching every child in the city and many more across Scotland and the UK.
“Glasgow has the experience and expertise to stage a world-class sporting event and what a privilege it would be to harness its ambition and vision for its young people to use its proven youth networks to work in partnership with the Olympic Movement to empower young people across the world.”