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The Times of India
The Times of India
Sport
K Shriniwas Rao | TNN

IOC members unanimously vote in India’s favour to host 2023 Olympic session

MUMBAI: Forty years after India last hosted an International Olympic Committee (IOC) Session, it will host another one again in 2023 in Mumbai.

International Olympic Committee (IOC) member Nita Ambani, on Saturday, made a presentation on the same to the IOC members in Beijing and the assembly unanimously voted in India’s favour to host the next ‘session’.

An Olympic Session is the general meeting of the members of the IOC and it's supreme organ. All IOC Session decisions are final. The IOC has a total of 101 members with voting rights, who attend the sessions.

The Indian delegation, led by Ms Ambani, also included Indian Olympic Association (IOC) president Narinder Batra, Youth Affairs and Sports Minister Anurag Thakur and India’s first individual Olympic gold medalist Abhinav Bindra.

“It’s a great moment of pride for India as this Olympic session will inspire a youth-heavy population of the country to adapt to a vibrant sporting culture,” say those who were tracking developments.

The presentation to host the session is the first step towards India hosting the Youth Olympics somewhere around 2030 and making a serious effort to host a Summer Olympics in the coming decade.

Allotting of the Olympic session will once again make India a crucial and an exciting destination to nurture and grow the Olympic movement. “It is our mission to identify potential talent and guide them to the greatness of the world of sport,” Ms Ambani said.

To coincide with the Olympic session in 2023, Ms Ambani has proposed to launch a series of elite sports development programmes for youth across deprived communities. The session itself will be held in the month of May-June in Mumbai.

India had last hosted a session in 1983.

Since 2016, since she became a member of the IOC, Ms Ambani has steadfastly raised the importance of the Olympic movement from an India perspective. In 2017, International Olympic Association (IOA) president N Ramachandran sought the permission of the central government to bid for the 2032 Olympics and the 2030 Asian Games.

In 2019, the evaluation committee of the IOC visited Mumbai to study the feasibility of hosting the session and approved the city’s candidature in 2020.

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