Latvian School Winter Festival debuts in a virtual format & gathers a record number of participants
Latvian School Winter Festival debuts in a virtual format and gathers a record number of participants; children cover 160,000 km doing #BeActive sports.
In order to promote the physical activity of pupils, the 24th Latvian School Winter Festival took place from February 19 to March 4, 2021, which for the first time took place virtually and was organised by the ENGSO partner – the Latvian Sports Federation Council (LSFC). 108 Latvian schools represented by 1,650 students participated in the festival, distributing more than 200 sets of medals.
Children competed in cross-country skiing, downhill skiing, snowboarding, running, Nordic walking and walking for two weeks. The results of the competition were simply recorded with the mobile phone itself, using the most popular GPS sports applications. The results were compiled on a platform specially created for the Festival, which included security filters to ensure fair-play principles. Results available: bit.ly/3tmNvk2
“Thank you to sports teachers who adopted this innovative competition format and actively involved pupils in innovation, we really appreciate the participation of teachers in this innovation project!” said Einars Fogelis, President of LSFC. He emphasized that organising the Winter Festival in the new reality was an ambitious challenge. “The virtual Latvian School Winter Festival is the first competition of its kind in Europe, covering winter sports and other sports available in winter, in which any student can participate,” said E. Fogelis.
The winners were determined by the most kilometers completed during the festival in all sports together. At the festival pupils completed a total of 160,000 km of sports. Alūksne Secondary School won the overall rating of educational institutions, covering a total of 6,249 km.
Participants were awarded in each school (top 3 boys and girls), in the overall evaluation of all schools and in the overall evaluation of educational institutions.
The traditional Winter Festival featured the traditional DJ competition in cooperation with the Riga DJ School. The DJ competition also took place in a virtual format and involved 1,700 FB users in the vote for the winner. Various other competitions took place on the Latvian Sports Federation Council social network Instagram and Facebook accounts, encouraging students to both think about sports and inspire each other to engage in sports activities and capture their activities in photo and video format.
The tradition of the Latvian School Winter Festival began in 1994 with the aim to give any pupil, even without professional skills in sports, the opportunity to participate and feel how diverse the opportunities are to be physically active even in winter and gain positive emotions from it.
