Culture & Education programme

The Culture & Education programme will offer a variety of innovative and interactive activities such as workshops, forums, art events, festivals of various world cultures and sports. These activities will have great appeal to the youth of the world, arousing in them the interest to communicate with one another and integrate themselves into the Olympic culture.

Educational activities

Educational interactive workshops and forums on the Olympic values, healthy lifestyles and anti-doping will prepare participants to become true sportspersons. The workshops will be hosted by well-known champions, international experts and world-class personalities in the fields of education, culture and sport. They will forge a new generation of athletes with a higher awareness of societal issues and problems linked directly to their practice of sport. The workshops will interact with the outside world through forums, internet chats and blogs.

Cultural activities

The cultural programme will incorporate all the important Olympic symbols (torch relay, anthem, flag) that provide the Olympic spirit and underline its values. In addition, a multi-cultural urban art and street festival with music, films and art will reflect the universality of the YOG and allow all participants — on-site and through media platforms — to share in a strong common experience.

The YOGOC will make every effort to solicit public support and youth participation. It will set in motion a range of motivating programmes in society at large, in schools, in youth organisations and among other young people. These programmes, which will focus on the knowledge, tradition and practice of the Olympic Movement, stimulate enthusiasm among the public, and attract attention to the YOG, thus laying a good groundwork for and creating the kind of social milieu conducive to the holding of the 2014 YOG.

● Olympic Readers: The YOGOC will commission experts to compile an Olympic Readers series. Seven in this series are planned respectively for such categories of people as college students, secondary school students, primary school students, and the YOG volunteers. Furthermore, the YOGOC will distribute the books and organise reading sessions and writing and other types of contests based on these books in order to spread the Olympic culture and make people interested in Olympism.

● Sports for All programme: The YOGOC will carry on the Sports for All programme that Nanjing has been implementing to attract all its residents. The programme includes such annual events as the 27-year-old “New Year’s Day Jog” (round-city jogging competition) on 1 January, the “Olympic Day Mountain Climb” on 23 June, and the “World Walking Day” (a walk round the City Wall of the Ming Dynasty) on 29 September. While these events will continue in the run-up to the 2014 YOG, the YOGOC will also implement Student Sports Programmes in local schools, where over 1.46 million students will engage in both modern Olympic sports and traditional Chinese games. The goal is that each student will acquire at least two sports that will be practised throughout their lives.

● Olympic Model Schools: Modelling on the examples of Culture & Education programmes launched during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, one hundred local schools will be selected as role models to initiate this Olympic education programme, which includes such activities as lectures on the Olympic culture, forums on sports and health-keeping, presentations of sports champions’ stories, annual sports festival, and painting and writing contests on the subject of Olympism. These schools will also form partnerships with schools in other countries to promote friendship.

● Mock NOC Conferences: Over 200 local schools will be called upon to organise mock National Olympic Committees in the form of “one school for one country (territory)”. The mock NOC conferences will use books, the Internet, TV and other media to gain knowledge about the customs, culture, economy, politics and geography of various countries they intend to represent and learn about the Olympic culture and about Olympic athletes in these countries. Together, the students of the city will hold online mock NOC meetings at regular intervals and make the proceedings of these meetings electronically accessible to young people in other parts of the world. Furthermore, during the YOG, students from each participating school will meet the athletes and other participants from the country (territory) it intends to represent and act as their cheering corps during the Games.

● Youth Olympic Festivals: Prior to the 2014 YOG, Nanjing will hold Youth Olympic Festivals each year featuring cultural exchange in promotion of the Olympic spirit. Youth organisations from the city and other parts of the world will be invited to showcase highlights of different cultures through artistic performances, together with running photo, stamp and historical exhibits on the Olympic culture in local schools and communities.

● YOG Ambassadors: In connection with the IOC’s Youth Ambassadors programme, the YOGOC will select 100 YOG Ambassadors from among applicants from different parts of the world. The winners will be elected in a democratic process through public vote, judged by their performance in Olympic knowledge quizzes, campaign speeches and talent shows. These young Ambassadors will be invited to Nanjing to participate in the cultural and educational activities during the YOG. The YOGOC will implement a series of programmes for the YOG Ambassadors to promote the Olympic values.

● New Media: Taking into consideration the close relationship between youth and new media, the YOGOC will make full use of new media, together with traditional media, to enhance and enrich the interaction between the YOG and the real day-to-day world through digital means. Taking full advantage of new media’s efficiency, convenience and influence, the Nanjing 2014 YOG website, with links to the IOC and Singapore 2010 websites, aims to draw as many young people as possible from around the world to engage in the YOG.

Virtual Youth Camp: The Nanjing 2014 YOG website will link up young people and schools around the world. Young people will pool stories about Olympic athletes, explore online the heritage of Olympism, and participate in interactive discussions, games and contests for the dissemination of the Olympic culture, thus raising the profile of the YOG and creating a congenial atmosphere for staging the Games and spreading the Olympic spirit.

Zheng He’s Voyage: Zheng He, a great navigator and peace envoy in ancient Chinese history, set off on his expeditions into the distant oceans from Nanjing about 600 years ago. The Nanjing 2014 YOG website will digitally reproduce Zheng He’s fleet and send it on a voyage by relays across the globe. The virtual voyage is so planned that everywhere it goes, it will send out to young people invitations to the 2014 YOG and invite them to join in quiz shows on knowledge about Olympism and its achievements in different parts of the world.