Uganda to celebrate FINA World Aquatics Day

Uganda is set to celebrate the first edition of the "FINA World Aquatics Day", at Gaba Landing Site and Rainbow International School pool on Saturday.

This follows an initiative aimed at celebrating Aquatics on the five continents on a specific day of the year to underline the value of the FINA sport in their communities.

Despite other countries having celebrated the event on July 19, Uganda will celebrate the event this week with over 1000 people expected to take part.

Addressing a press conference at UOC offices, Uganda Swimming Federation president Donald Rukare said the event is aimed at encouraging mass participation and awareness in issues to do with aquatics by having activities in rivers, lakes and swimming pools.

"The main goal of this initiative is to gather non-elite athletes - children, young athletes, occasional or regular competitors in aquatic disciplines, with a common objective of also enjoying aquatic physical activity.

"Every year, this event is supposed to grow bigger and the objective is to involve as many people as possible. We were at the World Championships in July and it was a bit busy for us but we shall have it now and also have a match along Gaba road.

"The key aspect for us is to bring awareness about aquatics. We would also like to create awareness on water safety and encourage as many people to swim. Swimming can even be used by other sportsmen for conditioning. We are also partnering with Swim Fit who will line up a number of volunteers to

"We would like to emphasise swimming as a life skill with mass participation and we are also about to encourage open water swimming, and in future we want to grow it to the level of marathons," Mwase added.

In his message to the National Federations, the FINA President Dr. Julio Maglione underlined that "the annual event is a chance to promote the aquatic sports on a national and international level and increase the level of physical activity on all five continents"