B.B.A. to Host Track and Field Championship Event
Deon Sutherland
The Belize Athletics Association is calling all Belizean athletes who are sixteen years of age and older to the Marion Jones Sporting Complex this weekend for its open national track and field championship event. As you will recall, for a year athletes weren’t able to train together and sporting events were put on hold due to the pandemic. But as the world is opening up, regional and global staging of sporting events are returning and Belize wants to get its athletes back out competing. So, that is why the B.B.A. is hosting this open event. President of the association Deon Sutherland tells us more.
Deon Sutherland, President, Belize Athletics Association
“Two weeks ago we had a time trial for the open competition for our athletes to see where they were at in preparation for the national competition. The national competition though is going to be used for more than just having the national. We are going to use it as a test for our international athletes. We have four athletes on the Olympic scholarship preparing for the games. We have the Central American Championship coming up and we have the PanAM U-23 championship. So, it is gonna be used a benchmark for these athletes to compete at that level. It will be the twenty-ninth and thirtieth which is Saturday and Sunday of this weekend. So, we hope that the athletes in all the different categories and events will come out and be a part of it. Anyone over the age of sixteen can participate. We don’t have the facility to do all track events but we do the major ones; the jumps – high jump, long jump, triple jump; the throws- the javelin, shot put, and discus; the track events – the 100, 200, 400, 800, 1500 and we are doing the 3,000 and 5,000 meters. So, those are the events we have planned and so teams that maybe just want to come out and have a relay team in the four by four hundred and four by one hundred you can come out and do those events as well.”
Andrea Polanco
“What kind of COVID-19 protocols will you have in place, for instance, parents may have concerns about sending their children there?”
Deon Sutherland
“We had to submit both our training protocols and our competition protocols to the national sports council. We will definitely have the mask wearing and the social distancing as best as possible and of course sanitization. We ask our athletes only time to take off mask is to compete but after they must put mask back on. We also ask them to social distance on the bleachers and we will have people there monitoring; we will have the police and our medical team.”
You can get in touch with the B.B.A. for a full schedule of events which start at nine a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Registration is ten dollars per athlete.
