Samoa steps up preparations for 2019 Pacific Games

Following the announcement a few weeks ago that Samoa will host the 2019 Pacific Games, the Government through the Samoa Association of Sports and National Olympic Committee (SASNOC) is stepping up its preparations, and intend to appoint an Organising Committee for the Games as soon as possible.

Samoa was announced the Game’s host after Tonga pulled out in July, citing financial concerns.

President of SASNOC, Fepuleai Patrick Fepuleai, said a lot needs to be achieved in a short space of time.

“We need to get our organising committee in place and with that we need a secretariat to help carry this out - these are the people that would be working full-time to help us deliver the Games,” he said.

“We need to appoint somebody to head that secretariat like a CEO so we need to get legislation in place to not only recognise but also incentive for our sponsors, so these things we did previously for the Pacific Games when we hosted in 2007 so the templates are all there.

“The only issue here is we have such a short turnaround time to do all this - it’s actually less than two years because it’s July 2019 when we are proposing to have the Games.”

Fepuleai said Samoa has budgeted just over $US16 million to run the Pacific Games but that figure could change.

“We submitted an amount in our bid to run the Games, not only to repair some of the facilities that we need to repair,” he said.

Fepuleai said the Pacific Games Council had given SASNOC certain tasks to achieve and deadlines to meet with just 21 months until the Games are scheduled to begin.