A CHEERLEADING team has defended plans for a national contest to go ahead at the BIC next month – which will see the vaccination programme there suspended.

Bournemouth Elite cheerleading team’s head coach Graham Baines, 30, said: “We’re really excited to go ahead and do it, most kids love cheerleading because of their chance to perform and they haven’t been able to that for 18 months, so they’re really looking forward to it.”

Originally the Future Cheer International Cheerleading Competition was scheduled for after the end of lockdown on June 21, but although this date has been postponed by the government, the competition is still allowed to go ahead, now on July 2-4.

Concerns were raised last month when the Daily Echo revealed the Bournemouth International Centre (BIC) was set to stop administering coronavirus jabs for several weeks to allow the competition to take place.

Although the cheerleading event, the largest of its kind in Europe, runs for just three days, health bosses said a longer closure of the vaccination centre was needed to give enough time for the pack-down and set up by both the NHS and the event organisers.

When asked about the pausing of the vaccinations at the BIC, Graham said: “It’s one we’ve tried not to go into too much because obviously the vaccination programme is being run by our government and I would trust that if the competition was endangering the roll-out then the cheerleading competition wouldn’t go ahead.”

Graham defended the importance of taking part in these competitions for the children’s wellbeing.

He said: “We want to make sure that we are providing everything that we can for our kids and their mental health.

“Everything that they’ve not been allowed to do for so long that they’ve absolutely loved doing, we want them to be able to go ahead and do that.”

He said they had been informed that the contest would not affect the vaccine roll-out in the area, and that there were still other places and opportunities to get the vaccine.

The team is standing by the decision to go ahead with the competition.

“Childhood goes so quickly and we’ve been blocked from doing competitions for almost two years,” said Graham.

“While it may not seem like a long time in terms of your life but for these guys, they’re just really excited to be able to get back to doing what they love.”