Belarus is ready to host the 2019 European Games, Alyaksandr Lukashenka said when meeting with Acting President of the European Olympic Committees (EOC) Janez Kocijancic on Friday.
“Belarus is not a superpower. But we pay a lot of attention to sport. I want our European organization to be as good as the organizations on other continents and the International Olympic Committee. In this regard I am a nationalist and a patriot. Therefore, you can count on Belarus,” state-run news agency BelTA quotes Lukashenka as saying.
Belarus was given the right to host the Second European Games in 2019 after a vote at the 45th General Assembly of the European Olympic Committees (EOC) in Minsk today.
Interestingly, in 2014 the Belarusian leader owned to his hatred of nationalists.
“I hate nationalists, because they are radicals whose activity will definitely cause a disaster – as it happened in Ukraine. I am trying to keep them on a short leash so that they would not mess things up. They are turning our native Belarusian language into a point of dispute in our society, which shouldn’t be happening at all! A language should not be a subject, a reason and a bone of discord,” he said in the thick of the Ukrainian crisis.
The first European Games was held in 2015 in Baku upon the initiative of EOC ex-president Patrick Hickey who was later charged with a number of violations. According to the Belarusian leader, the accusations of ticket touting are ‘ridiculous’ because the resale of tickets is not an option for a person who had been dealing with ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’.
