South Asian Cross Country Championship (SACCC) meet today; over 600 athletes to compete

The first international level sporting event- South Asian Cross Country Championship (SACCC) hosted by Nagaland at IG Stadium will be held on March 26, Saturday.
Along with the second SACCC, the 56th National Cross Country Athletics Championship will also be conducted.
The event will kick off at 7 am where more than 600 athletes will participate from all the AFI affiliated states and union territories of the country and also South Asian countries.
Participants from five countries- Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal and India have already arrived Kohima for the championship. Initially scheduled for January 15 this year, the Championship was postponed due to surge in Covid-19 cases during that period.
Addressing media persons at Hotel Vivor on Friday, Athletics Federation of India (AFI) president, Adile J. Surmiwala said North East India has a tremendous amount of sporting talents and expressed gratitude to chief minister, Neiphiu Rio and Associate VP of AFI, Abu Metha for the way the event is being organized.
He exuded confidence that from the event, the upcoming sportspersons will get enthused by witnessing the event adding that AFI was trying to do talent identification in Nagaland and provide high-performance coaches to train the Nagaland team.
Surmiwala also stressed on the need to create a full sports ecosystem with proper infrastructure, coaches, athletes, officials etc and said it took 15 years for AFI to secure an Olympic medal in athletics.
He informed that AFI has two-pronged strategy: one was grass-root level and the other was elite level with foreign coaches for the elite strategy and said that AFI will try to identify events for the North East where coaches are already in place.
Surmiwala also informed that close to 50 Athletes will take part in the international section while at national level 34 states and boards will be participating with 378 men and 296 women.
SAAF president, Dr. Lalit Bhanot said this was the second edition of the SAAF competition and the first edition held in Bhutan had to be postponed due to Covid-19 pandemic.
He informed that SAAF will train more district-level coaches from Nagaland and conduct various technical examinations so that they will become independent and conduct the events on their own and the athletes can avail training in-house.
Associate Vice President Athletics Federation of India, Abu Metha informed that physical infrastructure was of great importance and that the federation was strengthening the ecosystem of human resources and to upgrade the ecosystem of sports in the State and North East.
To a query, Metha said the state government was giving tremendous efforts to improve sports infrastructure in Nagaland and said the budget for the event was Rs. 4.6 crore out of which the state government has sanctioned Rs. 2.3 crore while Bank of Baroda has invested Rs. 18 lakh.
To another query, Surmiwala said there was a “new kids” athletic programme coming up in world athletics and India was selected as one of the first countries for the pilot project. He said it was an intense programme, fun-oriented to bring children into the athletic stream through fun and games and by the end of 2022 it will be launched.
Other officials from AFI also attended the press conference.