Competitions get underway in Brazzaville

Nearly 400 para-athletes from across Africa are in Brazzaville, Congo, this week (14-18 September) for athletics and powerlifting competitions as part of the 2015 All African Games.

The powerlifting got underway on Tuesday (15 September) with a new world record for Nigerian world champion Yakubu Adesokan, who is part of a group of nearly 100 athletes from 20 countries competing for a Paralympic ranking.

Adesokan (182.5kg) added 0.5kg to the previous best of Vietnam’s van Cong Le in the men’s up to 49kg. Algerian Ahmed Hadj Biour (131kg) took silver whilst Togo’s Alion Bawa (110kg) was third.

Live results are available at IPC Powerlifting’s website.

The athletics competition kicked off on Monday (14 September) with more than 300 athletes from 25 countries hoping to qualify for the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games.

The first gold medal went to Libyan Abdurraouf Said who threw 41.70m in the javelin F44.

In the lead up to the two competitions, classification was offered and a significant number of National Paralympic Committees used the opportunity to classify their athletes.

Rodrigo Bejarano, Secretary General of the African Paralympic Committee, said:

“I’m very happy and thankful that through the support of the Organising Committee, IPC Athletics and IPC Powerlifting and the technical officials these sports competitions can be offered.

“We are facing significant challenges to promote para-sport in Africa and these competitions are an important commitment of everybody. The classification opportunities for the athletes that were offered over the last days here in Brazzaville were extremely important.

“Thank you very much to the classifiers that came from different parts of the world.”