WPOC Completed Successfully by its Offline Closing Ceremony
According to the report received from the organizing committee of the 1st World Petanque Offline Cup, the WPOC closing ceremony was held on August 09th in offline method through the social media in order to represent the champions. In this innovative event hosting by the Boules and Petanque Association of Iran (BPAI), the national teams of Singapore, Indonesia, Islamic Republic of Iran, Kazakhstan, Netherlands and Wales rated first to sixth respectively and other participating nations who couldn’t rise to the finals, despite of their impressive performances, rated next and in a same level.
The International Humanitarian Games Association (IHGA) and International Petanque Federation (FIPJP) both supported the named event as their first mutual cooperation in world level. It was the first world class offline event for Petanque at all times and organized in two styles of Standard Shooting and Parthian Shooting in 8 different categories of men, women and juniors through sending the videos of players’ performances to the WPOC secretariat located in the HQ office of the IHGA and judged by the FIPJP umpires from Australia, Canada and Iran.
The WPOC was the developed edition of its national event founded and organized by the BPAI, two months before the WPOC, in order to combating against COVID-19 and keep players active, motivated and determined during the pandemic. Dr. Jasem Manouchehri, Chairman of Organizing Committee of the WPOC declared that “in contrary to the public belief indicating that the COVID-19 will lead people to individualism, it is believed that the world is going to develop interactions and relationships between people in another way and we experienced its reality in the amazing sport event of WPOC by our perceived collectivism. It wasn’t a simple event. I realized the excitement of umpires when they were judging accurately the videos of all villages, small cities and municipalities citizen players who had an equal chance to compete in a world level event regardless of their conditions. It was a real combating against the pandemic and we all felt our presence in serious competitions.”
You can find the final results of the WPOC categories on the FIPJP website and play the closing ceremony video of each in the provided links.