Limassol municipal council will discuss next year’s marathon on Tuesday, after the company that had the contract for holding the event for the past 11 years announced it will hold races on the same dates.

The council will convene in an extraordinary meeting at 5pm on Tuesday exclusively to discuss the issue that arose, after the decision of GSO (Olympia Sports Club) to award the Limassol marathon to a new contractor.

“We will decide tomorrow how we will react to these developments,” Mayor Nicos Nicolaides told the Cyrpus News Agency.

Nicolaides was surprised that GSO had decided on its own to award the contract for the marathon to a new company. He felt this went against the memorandum of understanding among the four Limassol bodies – municipality, GSO, the Limassol chamber of commerce and industry (Evel) and Etal – about the collective administration of the marathon.

The agreement ran counter to the spirit of the collective management of the marathon “because based on the memorandum we signed, all decisions are taken collectively and with the agreement of all,” said Nicolaides.

In response, Kyriacos Tsolakis, the president of GSO, told the Cyprus News Agency that he was shocked to hear the mayor’s surprise, since it was up to the club to decide who the contract for the Limassol marathon would go to.

Meanwhile, the former contractor announced last week it will hold its own OPAP Limassol marathon on the same dates – March 18 and 19 – as the new contractor.

Limassol Marathon is the largest sports event in Cyprus with international recognition featuring six races and four parallel events. The 14th marathon took place earlier this year, after being cancelled for two years because of the pandemic.