Where are they? The non-Olympic sports often remain invisible in the DOSB (DOSB headquarters in Frankfurt am Main)
With what intentions are the almost 30 leading associations in non-Olympic sports looking to the next General Assembly of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) on December 4th with the election of a new presidium?
It will be very exciting in Weimar because a real paradigm shift can be expected at the top. There will no longer be a presidium with vice-presidents for a specific department. Instead, the Presidium will function as a whole body like a supervisory board. I very much hope that with this construction and a new management team, the umbrella organization will find serious work, which after the failures could not have been talked about recently. The first big construction site is already waiting if the important position of a DOSB CEO has to be filled by January 1st.
And what are the expectations of your particular interestsgcommunity, the from Jiu-Jitsu athletes, billiards and chess players up to around 15,000 organized Sportakrobaten Includes athletes in all possible non-Olympic sports?
In any case, we will run our own candidate for the Presidium, even if his chances are not very good. In terms of content, we hope for an amendment to the statutes that would be a milestone for non-Olympic sport. So far, only each of our associations is an official member of the DOSB, but not our interest group, which is registered as a civil law society and represents over five million members. After more than 15 years of the DOSB, this status should finally be changed, so that after years of back and forth with this amendment to the statutes – if it is approved – our plenary assembly will finally become a full member of the umbrella organization. We fought for a long time for this recognition, which we have not been able to get up to now. Among other things, this would give us the right to submit our own applications to the umbrella organization. We do not want to become determiners, but in future we want to appear as a recognized, integrated member.
Many representatives of the so-called small sports complain for a long time that they no longer feel adequately represented by the umbrella organization founded in 2006. How do you see it
We too often had the feeling that under President Thomas Bach and since 2013 under his successor Alfons Hörmann at the top, what counted was above all competitive Olympic sport. Everything else was more or less perceived as secondary, so that we join the desire to pay more attention to the diversity of the sport and its breadth. To put it bluntly, I like to say that more than 95 percent of all those who do sports nationwide can be considered non-Olympic because they never have the chance or are eligible to participate in the Olympic Games. Even so, one could define “non-Olympic” and adjust the socio-political focus accordingly. A few years ago, our associations received a total of 2.4 million euros in funding from the federal government. Later, when the DOSB received over 250 million euros from the Federal Ministry of the Interior alone, there was an increase for us to 3.9 million euros, whereby we had to pass on almost half of this additional money to the World Games disciplines of the Olympic associations. That illustrates the situation. We’re glad we survived.
After all, since 2020 there has been an increase of ten million euros per year from the federal government for non-Olympic sport.
We have noticed over the years that non-Olympic sports also have fans and supporters among political decision-makers. Because of the pandemic with many canceled and canceled events and because of the bureaucratic obstacles, only a small part of this additional ten million euros actually flowed. The biggest obstacle is that at the time when funding for each association was very small, we bundled the application to the DOSB. In a nutshell, they were increasingly overwhelmed by providing the donors with the funds we were entitled to. This practice must end. There are funds in the budget for the establishment of a NOV office (non-Olympic umbrella organizations, jW), in which support and advice could be bundled. That would be a great relief for our associations, which work exclusively on a voluntary basis, because the application formalities have become more and more complicated and the requirements stricter.
