In the serious crisis at the German Olympic Sports Confederation, there are new allegations against the outgoing association leaders Alfons Hörmann and Veronika Rücker. According to information from three DOSB board members, the association president and the board chairwoman took legal action against the former board member Karin Fehres against a joint decision of the board.
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This emerges from a letter from top-level sports director Dirk Schimmelpfennig, CFO Thomas Arnold and sports youth manager Christina Gassner to the employees of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, which is available to the German Press Agency.
“We deeply regret the entire process,” said Saturday’s statement. The cause of the turbulence at the DOSB was anonymously published complaints from employees about a “culture of fear” in the association’s headquarters. Most recently it became known that Rücker and Hörmann had asked Fehres to admit that they were the author of the anonymous e-mail from the 6th e-mail, threatening a criminal complaint and civil action. Fehres had rejected this as “absurd and baseless”.
Hörmann and Rücker had come under fire for their approach, and several sub-organizations of the DOSB sided with Fehres. Although both defended their actions in a joint statement, Rücker will now give up her position at the end of the year. Hörmann had already announced his resignation, a new DOSB president will be elected on December 4th in Weimar.
“Not agreed with any of us”
The board members welcomed the clarification by Hörmann and Rücker in the letter affair. They were “not or not fully informed and not involved in essential decisions”. Schimmelpfennig, Arnold and Gassner emphasize that the content of the lawyer’s letter to Fehres was “not coordinated with any of us”.
For months there have been new shocks at the umbrella organization. In their joint statement on Friday, Hörmann and Rücker referred to the “considerable damage” that the DOSB and German sport had suffered as a result of the anonymous employee letter affair. “We are still convinced that it was fundamentally correct and that it was our responsibility to investigate the background of the letter in order to protect the DOSB,” they said.
In retrospect, however, the criticism of disproportionate action against Fehres is justified, admitted Hörmann and Rücker. The sharply worded letter from a lawyer to Fehres was released by them alone.
In order to avert further damage to the umbrella organization, the presidium agreed with Rücker to end the cooperation on December 31st. The 51-year-old has been in office since January 2018. In addition, the lawyers had been commissioned to “create a documentation of this current process in order to pass it on to the ethics committee for assessment”. In the midst of the turbulence, the aim is to ensure an “orderly transition” for the new head of the association.
The new allegations against the outgoing top officials should also overshadow the official start of the election campaign for Hörmann’s successor. On Sunday, the three candidates for the DOSB presidency, who had been recommended by a selection committee, will introduce themselves to the member organizations of the umbrella organization in Düsseldorf. The former world class fencer Claudia Bokel, the CSU politician Stephan Mayer and the still incumbent table tennis world president Thomas Weikert will enter the race.
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