One year from today, over 4,000 of the best athletes from all 50 European National Olympic Committees (ENOCs) will gather in Minsk, Belarus, for the start of the second edition of Europe’s premier multi-sport event, the European Games.

Minsk 2019 organisers will celebrate the occasion with a charity fun run in the Belarusian capital city in the morning, followed by the unveiling of a countdown clock and the grand re-opening of the iconic Dinamo Stadium following many months of refurbishments.

Innovation, Youth and Sustainability are the key words for delivering a once-in-a-life-time experience. EOC intention with the European Games is to be a world leader in terms of innovation and youth engagement. Next year, Minsk will welcome a number of youth-oriented sport disciplines such as 3×3 basketball, which will be making its first Olympic Games’ appearance a year later at Tokyo 2020, and the increasingly popular beach soccer.

A revolutionary new athletics competition will also be making its debut at Minsk 2019. Dynamic New Athletics, or DNA, is being billed as “a compact and unpredictable mixed-gender, team-based format, designed to present a more alternative, modernised version of athletics and engage new and younger audiences.” The EOC is excited to see its inclusion on the sports programme for Minsk 2019 and will continue to encourage our stakeholders to push the envelope in sports, which has long been a defining characteristic of our continent.

The European Olympic Committees (EOC) has also been working closely with the Minsk organisers to ensure that the principles contained in the International Olympic Committee (IOC)’s reform packages Olympic Agenda 2020 and the New Norm are applied wherever possible, in particular measures related to sustainability and cost-effectiveness. Of the 12 competition venues to be used at Minsk 2019, for example, 11 are existing facilities. Only the beach soccer venue had to be built from scratch, with renovations required at the shooting venue and Dinamo Stadium, which re-opened to the public today.

“It is our ambition to develop the European Games into the second most important sporting event on the calendar behind the Olympic Games. We remain steadfastly committed to accomplishing our goal with the support of our stakeholders, including the IOC, the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC), the ENOCs, and the European sports federations”, EOC President Janez Kocijančič stated in a declaration to the media.

“With a highly successful first edition of the Games in Baku in 2015 already under our belts, and with full confidence in Minsk 2019, we feel that we are well on our way to making this goal a reality”, he concluded.