2013 SU Update: One Day of Universiade rehearsed in Kazan

KAZAN – Day 8 of the 27th Summer Universiade was rehearsed on February17 inKazan. The Universiade basketball tournament’s final event was staged on the court of the basketball venue.

In the preparation for the match and during its staging, the 2013 Games organisers have exercised activities in such key functional areas as management of sports program, sports venue operation, transportation service, doping control, cooperation withFISU, media coordination, etc.

Needless to say, the event rehearsal would have been impossible if it were not for Kazan 2013 volunteers who helped the organising committee and role-playedFISUFamily members, members of the organising committee, representatives of TV broadcasting companies, copyright holders, accredited media people and other client groups of the future World University Summer Games. Apart from that, volunteers were executing their direct duties; they escorted ‘officials’ and ‘athletes’ and also assisted in a number of other functional roles. Up to 170 volunteers took part in the rehearsal.

The roles of basketball players were assigned to the students of the UNICS junior school. They played a fully-fledged match:four periods of ten minutes each.

A situation was modeled during the rehearsal to test the organising committee’s competence in various fields of responsibility:accreditation and access zone definition for different client groups, meeting and seeing off athletes, emergency care on the field of play, doping control, TV broadcasting, media coverage of events, victory ceremonies and event management of the final press conference. In order to test their response skills ahead of Kazan 2013, the organisers also ran through a few on-field incidents. When, in the middle of the match, an overexcited ‘fan’ ran onto the field chanting «Russia!Russia!», the security guards came up with the required response in a timely manner and quickly caught the ‘disturber’ to take him out of the hall.

Emergency care drills were also carried out to render first aid to one of the ‘organisers’ that ‘broke a leg’:health care providers and medical volunteers took the ‘injured organiser’ out of the field, gave emergency medical treatment and ‘sent her to hospital in an ambulance’.

“Rehearsals like the one today is invaluable in the context of the preparations for the 27th Summer Universiade inKazan”, 1st Deputy Director General of the Kazan 2013 Executive Directorate Azat Kadyrov said. “Today we’ve conducted our first rehearsal of real-life Games-time situations at an actual venue. Of course, not everything went as smooth as expected but the main purpose of the rehearsal was to test the theoretical model of preparing and staging the events to its full extent. We will conduct a profound analysis; we’ll take into consideration observation and feedback from our volunteers that, as I hope, will make the backbone of the volunteer team. In the near future, we plan to hold similar rehearsals in each of 21 venues where the final competitions will take place”, Azat Kadyrov summed up.

(Source: Media Department of Kazan 2013 Executive Directorate)