500th day until the next global skills Competition – WorldSkills Kazan 2019
On April 9, the 500th day until the next global skills Competition – WorldSkills Kazan 2019 – the WorldSkills Flag Relay has reached Seoul in Korea.
During the ceremony at Seoul Technical High School the WorldSkills Competitions in Busan (1978) and Seoul (2001) were remembered, and patches from those Competitions were added to the WorldSkills flag.
The international leg of the WorldSkills Flag Relay started on March 12 in Madrid, Spain, where skills competitions began in 1950.
The event in Korea at the Closing Ceremony of Regional Skills Competition Korea was the fifth stop of the international section of the flag relay. San-Quei Lin, Vice President for Special Affairs in WorldSkills International, Kim Dong-Man, President of WorldSkills Korea, and Marat Zakirov, representative of the WorldSkills Kazan 2019 Organizing Committee took part in the Flag Relay Ceremony.
There was also a presentation of WorldSkills Kazan 2019, which will be held in Russia in August next year. The WorldSkills Competition brings together the very best young talents in vocational skills and trades, to compete to be world champions in more than 50 different skills.
The Flag Relay started last year when the WorldSkills Flag was handed to Kazan, the next WorldSkills host city, on 20 October during the Closing Ceremony of WorldSkills Abu Dhabi 2017. The flag arrived in Sochi, Russia the next day. It was then launched into space and kept on board the International Space Station for more than two months, before returning at the end of February.
The international leg of the WorldSkills Flag Relay started on March 12 in Madrid, Spain, where skills competitions began in 1950.
The Flag will also travel to the United Arab Emirates, Chinese Taipei, Finland, Australia, Canada, Portugal, Switzerland, Brazil, Austria, Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and Japan.
After the international phase of the relay is complete the flag will travel across Russia: 85 regions of the country, including 43 municipal districts and 2 cities of the Republic of Tatarstan. The relay is scheduled to culminate in Kazan on the day of the WorldSkills Kazan 2019 Opening Ceremony.