Retired Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell has been lined up as a keynote speaker at the Bermuda Olympic Association’s Equity in Motion event on November 15.

Powell, who came to the island for the Bermuda Grand Prix in 2023, is scheduled to address guests at a banquet to be held at Grotto Bay Beach Resort & Spa after a day of activities targeted mostly at females.

Donna Raynor, chair of BOA’s gender diversity and inclusion committee, pointed out that while they would have loved to have a female to address the occasion, Powell fits the bill.

“We spoke to a few female athletes and they weren’t available, so we settled for Asafa Powell,” Raynor told The Royal Gazette.

“Cydonie Mothersille, who’s also on the World Athletics Council, knows Asafa. She was able to contact his agent and she was happy for him to come over.

“What we try to do for a lot of our gender leadership events is that we have males speaking as well. It’s always good to have male allies who support gender equality and gender leadership.

“Asafa has a female agent, he’s married and has two daughters.”

According to Raynor, activities on that day are being held in conjunction with the North American, Central American and Caribbean Athletic Association.

“I chair both of the joint leadership committees,” she said. “I decided that we should do something joint. It’s going to be about 14 countries that will be represented from the NACAC area.

“We’ve got people coming from Antigua & Barbuda as well, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, St Lucia, Jamaica, Grenada, Cayman, Turks & Caicos, El Salvador and the United States.

“We do a lot of gender leadership training and certification around the region. We’ve invited some of those women that attended those courses to attend, but then there's others that are coming on their own as well.”

Plans are in place to commence the day’s proceedings with a 5K walk around the Railway Trail before the participants get into various workshops.

“Because everybody’s going to be staying at Grotto Bay, we’re going to start our day off with a nice and relaxed walk,” Raynor said.

“Hopefully, it’s a nice morning, everybody could just get out and have a nice walk, talk and mingle, then come back.

“From Grotto Bay, we’ll go through the trails. It will also be a nice scenery for the people that have never been to Bermuda before.

“For the workshops in the morning, we’re going to have three sessions so that if people want to go to other sessions.

“For engaging young girls in sport, we’re offering the national sport governing bodies three free tickets each to young girls from their sporting codes to attend.

“We have a safeguarding workshop because that’s a big topic in all sports right now. We also have female coaches and officials because we’re trying to increase the number of women coaches and officials across the board.

“Then, of course, we’re having a session on leadership and inspiration. That’s pretty much trying to get women to a point where they feel that they can be leaders of their sports.

“For each of these sessions, we have some top facilitators, some from outside Bermuda. We have someone from Barbados and the United States, so it’s different people that were incorporated as facilitators for these workshops.

“Our cocktail starts at 6pm and the banquet itself starts at 7pm, where we’ll have Asafa Powell as our speaker.”

A portion of the ticket sales will go towards the Jamaica Hurricane Melissa relief efforts.