A 40-member contingent consisting of the core probables from Indian Athletics, in the early hours on Monday, left for Spala in central Poland for the last leg of preparations ahead of this year’s Summer Olympics at Rio de Janeiro.
The team, featuring both male and female participants in the 400m, 400m hurdles and 4x400m relays other than seven leading javelin throwers, will set up camp to train at the state-of-the-art Olympic Preparation Centre in Spala, where they will be joined by the Indian race-walkers who have already qualified for the 20km and 50km events to be held at Rio once they are done competing at the IAAF Race Walk World Championships in Rome.
The Spala region offers wonderful weather conditions that will assist all kinds of sporting drills, which was one of the foremost reasons for the Indian athletes to select this training centre for their purposes.
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Besides practising alongside the talented Polish Olympians themselves, the Indian brigade will get to cut down on a lot of travelling time when they go visiting the surrounding competition venues of Europe, courtesy the locational advantage of this village.
The most important factor, however, is the ensemble of exquisite in-house facilities that will provide the athletes with remarkable comfort and thereby help them stay in the best of shape during this crucial period in the run-up to Rio.
The Sports Ministry has, therefore, decided to bear all the expenses for the group of participants, coaches and support staff alike, who are set to spend the next three months at the Eastern European address.
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The Athletics Federation of India (AFI) Secretary General Mr C. K. Valson expressed his earnest gratitude to Mr Tomasz Lukaszuk, the Ambassador of Poland in New Delhi for his support in providing the Indian squad with this delightful opportunity to shift base to Spala in an effort to bolster their preparatory campaign for the Olympic games.
He also made it a point to thank the Sports Authority of India and the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports for their respective contributions to the programme.
In response, Mr Lukaszuk spoke of the noteworthy congenial ties shared by the two nations over long periods of their history. He further went on to praise the high-performing Indian athletes who have arrived at this stage and forwarded his best wishes to the outgoing unit before they eventually departed for their Polish destination.
