Session : Sport Integrity: a Right for Youth

3

ICT and Sport

Session : Sport Integrity: A Right for Youth

Sport Integrity as a Universal Value for the

International Community

Wednesday 6 November 2013
Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland

Opening Remarks

Houlin Zhao

Deputy Secretary-General,
International Telecommunication Union

Excellencies,
Distinguished colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,

·  It is a great pleasure to be here with you today.

·  I think we all recognize that sport plays a crucial role in all societies and in all cultures.

·  In today’s world, technology – and in particular information and communication technologies, ICTs – also play a crucial role in all of our lives, and surely, as well as in the lives of young people.

·  I am very pleased to join you at this meeting. I am grateful for the warm words by H.E. Mr. Al-Thani, Secretary General of the Qatar Olympic Committee, who appreciated the importance of ICT in sports as well as his recognition of ITU’s participation at this meeting.

·  To save time at this late hour of the morning sessions, I will not read my text but highlight some points and contributions.

·  ITU is the oldest international organization in the world – we have time and again seen communications playing a vital role in bringing people together to celebrate major sporting events, and in particular the Olympic Games.

·  The first modern Olympic Games, in Athens, in 1896, were covered by reporters who transmitted stories and results back to their newspapers via the international telegraph system.

·  The first live radio broadcasts were sent from the Chamonix winter Olympics in 1924.

·  The Tokyo Games in 1964 marked the advent of the first television coverage.

·  The most recent Games – in Beijing in 2008 and London in 2012 – were the most widely broadcast and widely communicated events in human history.

·  Thanks to the work of ITU in developing the communications standards and networks which provide the public the means to enjoy those Games although they can’t come to the places where the Games were held.

·  I was invited by NHK and BBC to join the ceremony of launching the new TV system on the Olympic Games in 2012, which was held in London, at the end of July 2012, just prior to the official opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games.

Ladies and gentlemen,

·  With new technologies and services offered by ICT, the referee and judges can better manage the competition and matches, the athletes can better train themselves and the general public can enjoy the beauty of the modern sport competition, game shows and enjoy those sports they can follow to strengthen their bodies, to enjoy life, etc.

·  All these advantages are enjoyed by people, particularly young people.

·  At ITU, on 17 May every year we celebrate World Telecommunication and Information Society Day. In 2007, the WTISD theme was ‘Connecting the young: the opportunities of ICT’; in 2009, the theme was ‘Protecting children in cyberspace’; and in 2012, the theme was ‘Women and Girls in ICT’.

·  We have also been very active recently in hearing the voices of young people themselves, most notably through the BYND 2015 Global Youth Summit, which was held in Costa Rica in early September.

·  At ITU, we are proud that ICT is not a part of the problem, but ICT can be a part of any solutions.

·  Globalization, technology and financial growth have started to change sport for better and also for worse to some extent. Transnational organized crime has begun to see and find in the world of sport, a target and a field to conduct many illegal operations.

·  Sport results manipulation is another plague.

·  We have heard a lot of debates on this topic this morning. To fight against those problems, and, in particular, sport criminal actions, the ICT could play an important role. The ICT can help investigations. Internet access, mobile phones, social media etc. the public can use the modern telecom technologies to help the Law system to bring the evil to justice.

·  Before I finish my short remarks, I would like to share with you that ITU will organize ITU Telecom 2013 in Bangkok in two weeks’ time and ITU Telecom 2014 will be organized in Qatar in December 2014. The ITU Telecom Events are widely conceived as “Olympics of ICTs”. In the Telecom Events there are some thematic pavilions on public health, on public education, on emergency etc. We could organize some thematic pavilions on sports in our future Events. I would like to invite our friends from sport to join us at Telecom 2014, if you can’t make it to Telecom 2013 this year.

·  I trust that the debates at this panel, as well as the other panels, will help us to create a better sport environment for young people, and for all of us, too. I applaud the efforts of the organizers for this meeting.

·  Thank you for your attention.