Murofushi hammers home the World Athletics Day message

A week before the global Athletics family celebrates the 2007 IAAF World Athletics Day over the weekend of Saturday and Sunday (12 & 13 May), which is annually one of the busiest weekends in the Athletics calendar, one of the star names of Japanese and world athletics Koji Murofushi took part in an IAAF Kids’ Athletics event in Osaka on Sunday 6 May.

The venue for this promotion of youth sport was the city’s Nagai stadium which from 25 August to 2 September this year will host the 11th IAAF World Championships in Athletics, and the two events are inextricably linked. As in the past, the most successful young athletes from each nation’s World Athletics Day competitions will be submitted into a draw with the ‘lucky winners’ invited to Osaka for the World Championships with their travel and full board accommodation costs covered by the IAAF.

Yesterday’s Kids’ Athletics which was organized in association with the Local Organising Committee of the Osaka World Championships came just a day after 26,000 spectators had watched a very successful edition of the Osaka IAAF GP, a part of the IAAF World Athletics Tour, which was held in the Nagai stadium.

Murofushi, the Olympic Hammer Throw champion, was the star guest coordinator of the Kids’ Athletics at which 80 young boys and girls from 6 different primary schools in the Osaka region got a unique chance to meet their hero.

For the 32-year-old Asian record holder, who three-times has been a World Championship medallist, the occasion reminded him how he felt as a teenager 16 years before in Tokyo at the time of the 3rd IAAF World Championships in Athletics when he got the chance of watching legends like Carl Lewis and Mike Powell.

Kids’ Athletics is a project of the IAAF Development Programme, and it aims to introduce children to the basic skills of athletics – running, jumping and throwing – making sure that the experience remains fun.

Murofushi spent more than one hour with the group of young kids, which might well contain some of the future champions of Japan, encouraging them with his own experiences, with the message that the basic disciplines and actions of Athletics remain at the core of all sports, playing an important if not central role in a child’s physical development.

IAAF