No meet is ‘valid’ without having technical officials, UPAA tells its district units
LUCKNOW Athletics meet across the state would be treated ‘unofficial’ and the performances of the athletes won’t be counted if the meet or event was not conducted under the supervision of the technical officials so having at least 10 qualified technical officials in a district is a must from now onwards.
A decision to this effect has been made by the Uttar Pradesh Athletics Association in view of the directives from the Athletics Federation of India.
Now, all 60 districts units affiliated to the UPAA across the state will have to have 10 technical officials, including four referees, four judges, a competition manager and a competition director.
This has been decided at the special general assembly of the UPAA and the main objective of this policy is to ensure ‘no rigging’ or ‘fraud’ in athletics meets even at the district level.
“The purpose of this is to avoid the wrong judgment by the nontechnical officials in the meet. Now, an athlete would feel confident that his or her results are genuine and there is no rigging or fraud as this was happening in the past due to the involvement of non-technical officials,” UPAA’s secretary-general PK Srivastava said.
He, however, said that a district unit will be required to have 20 technical officials and only in crisis situation they can work with minimum 10 officials.
If there are no qualified technical officials in the meet, the championship would not be treated officials as well as the performance of the athletes would not be counted for further selections.”
He also made it clear that units having no sufficient number of technical officials in districts will be allowed to hire officials but only for the neighboring districts. “If all goes well we will be having our first set of exams for district technical officials (DTOs) in the first week of July as AAFI wants to implement this system as soon as possible,” said Srivastava.
There are 84 qualified technical officials in as many as 60 affiliated districts of the UPAA and they include nine of level one, five federation technical officials and rest as the federation state technical officials. “The AAFI wants to have a common curriculum for everyone across country.”
OFFICIAL’S SEMINAR
:
Meanwhile, the Athletics Federation of India on Monday conducted SAAF-AFI technical seminar exclusively for women officials online. The idea behind this is to involve athletes, coaches and technical officials to make them active by vision of knowledge sharing amongst athletics fraternity of South Asia, India and other continents. More than 650 women officials from all SAAF Countries, few Asian Countries, Europe, Iraq, Oceana and India took part. Pierce O’Callaghan from Ireland and U Haridas from hosts delivered lectures on different issues. Kanpur’s Anjani Dubey represented Uttar Pradesh in the seminar.