The third edition of the Amuwo Games will hold in November this year, organizers have announced.
This was disclosed at a press conference held on Thursday at the Amuwo Odofin Local Government.
Present at the press conference are chairman of Amuwo Odofin Local Government Engineer Valentine Buraimoh, his Chief of Staff Segun Idris, founder of the Amuwo Odofin Games and chairman Local Organising Committee Seun Ayeni, sponsors of the games among others.
The games which started in 2017 with the second edition in 2019, are scheduled to take place only in the weekends of November and will run from 6th to 28th.
Athletes will take part in 17 sports among which include football, basketball, volleyball, chess, scrabble, swimming, athletics, table tennis, tennis, cycling, drought etc.
The games will hold all over Amuwo and among venues that will host events are Mile 2 primary school, FHA field, FHA tennis club and Darius Sports Bar.
Speaking to journalists LOC chairman and founder of the games Ayeni said:”I’ve been working since 2017 on this sporting festival with some of my friends and colleagues and people in the community. Yes, I’m the founder but it doesn’t mean I’m the all and all, we are a group of guys trying to make something happen in our community.
“This is the third edition, the first was in 2017, the second was in 2019. We decided to hold it every two years because of the glamour.”
Ayeni spoke on the games on offer and the age grade in some of the sports.
“We had 16 games in the last two editions but this year we are adding one more game which is the five-aside tournament. The games include football, basketball, volleyball, chess, scrabble, swimming, table tennis, tennis, drought, cycling. Some of these games are age grade, we have the U-13, U-17 and the open. For instance, chess, scrabble, swimming are age graded. Also, there’s a mini 10km marathon that happens in Amuwo Games.”
On who the participants are, Ayeni said they are residents of Amuwo.
“Those who will take part are residents of Amuwo, in fact they have started registering and when I checked this morning about 600 people have registered. From this 600 we will still have to do some screening, some people have to go through medical checks so we may end up with about 500 athletes to take part in this games.”
And on the inspiration behind the games, Ayeni added:”We saw that the youths are very energetic. It happened at a time that there was an election in 2017 that was making people very agitated. And so that time the youths were very agitated so we just thought of something because Amuwo is a bit volatile. So we decided to do something to take the attention of these youths away from politics and put it into something else and we created Amuwo Games. It was a good tool to help curb the restiveness of the youths and also for youth development.”
