The World Friendship Games Mascot Has Been Named
The World Friendship Games mascot has been named Dobryak. The official announcement was made at the World Friendship Games stand as part of the 27th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, currently taking place in the northern Russian capital.
The name of the mascot of the World Friendship Games was chosen by a jury headed by Umar Kremlev, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Games Organising Committee. The shortlist of possible names included TigRasha, SporTiger and Dobryak. Dobryak received an absolute majority of votes.
The World Friendship Games mascot was unveiled during the World Youth Festival in Sochi in March this year. The process of creating the mascot began in November 2023 and consisted of several stages.
In the first stage, the Organising Committee requested experts from the Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (RPORC) to use special focus groups to select a list of characters that would form the basis of the mascot designs.
In the next stage, the Organising Committee held a competition among leading animation studios in Russia for the right to develop visual images representing the characters selected during the focus group stage. Soyuzmultfilm, one of the oldest and most famous companies, won the competition. The studio's artists developed several dozen sketches of the selected characters, which later formed a shortlist of three options that best met the Organising Committee's brief.
The next step was to form a 19-member jury of experts, chaired by Umar Kremlev. It included renowned athletes, film and pop stars, as well as the World Friendship Games Ambassadors. Svetlana Romashina, the most decorated athlete in the history of Artistic Swimming, Roman Vlasov, two-time Olympic champion in Greco-Roman Wrestling and Games Ambassador, the film director Fyodor Bondarchuk, Askold Zapashny, artistic director of the Great Moscow State Circus and Svetlana Akulova, director of the Moscow Zoo joined the board.
The jury members had to choose between a tiger, a bear and a squirrel.
The winner was determined following a hard and uncompromising contest. The tiger was just a few votes ahead of his competitors.
