The youngsters stay on the ball and test their motor skills
As a pediatrician, Kerstin Holze knows very well what the motor skills of the offspring are like after the restrictions in the pandemic. No wonder that the Vice President of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) came up with several dramatic appeals. The reduction of lack of exercise should be proclaimed as a “national health goal”. “We’re all becoming more and more immobile, our children and adults are forgetting elementary skills such as running, jumping, throwing, climbing or swimming,” Kerstin Holze stated on April 27 before the sports committee of the Bundestag. A body for which it is currently more important to remove its chairman, who is accused of doping, the 1980 Biathlon Olympic champion, Frank Ullrich (SPD), from this position than to devote himself to what is probably the most important sporting topic of the present.
According to Holze, a new course for mass and health sports is essential in order to absorb the consequences of the corona measures in the population: “We have to get this country moving again in a joint effort. We need a joint sports and exercise summit. Convened by the Federal Government, upon invitation and under the auspices of the Federal Chancellery. We have to sit down together at the table so that everyone responsible realizes that movement affects us all.«
Two weeks earlier, on the occasion of World Health Day, the DOSB Vice President had warned that exercise and active sporting activities should be regarded as “an indispensable component of the physical and mental well-being of each individual”. “The common goal of organized sport and politics must now be to make sport available to everyone and to get Germany moving. Our sports clubs and associations and their members have developed trend-setting suggestions for this, such as the Hamburg exercise voucher.« Thomas Weikert, President of the umbrella organization with its around 27 million members in around 90,000 clubs, even spoke of a »cultural change« that society is about to face to accomplish. It must finally be recognized that exercise and sport are invaluable, both for the development of children and young people and for the well-being and health of the adult population.
It’s just stupid that the noble words of the DOSB leadership cannot be backed up with analyzes of how much the restrictions resulting from lockdown and sports bans at the base have also affected the number of members, for example. The last statistical overview, which states a loss of around 800,000 club athletes nationwide for 2020, dates from last October. A balance for 2021 is not expected until autumn, as reported by the sports center in Frankfurt am Main jW-demand was to be experienced. Officially, the 16 state sports associations (LSB) have until June 30th to report their membership statistics from the previous year. Only then can an overall view be taken, although the results are important as sports policy trumps in politics.
Instead of convincingly coming up with up-to-date data, it remains piecemeal for the time being. Brandenburg, for example, reported a total of 345,219 active people organized in clubs as of January 1, 2022. Although this is 1,467 more than in the previous year, it is still a good 10,000 fewer athletes than before the pandemic. The LSB Berlin, which currently has almost 685,000 members, reports that of the 33,000 athletes who left the clubs in the first year of the pandemic, around two thirds returned in 2021. Thuringia and Saxony have already done their homework. Almost 348,000 people are currently involved in sports between Eisenach and Gera. In addition to the decline of more than 15,000 in the first year of the pandemic, there were another 2,200 in the previous year. In Saxony, too, the downward trend continued for two years in a row and cost the local LSB more than 26,000 members, including almost 9,500 children and teenagers.
Ulrich Franzen, President of the LSB Sachsen, describes the trend in the age group “U 18”, which probably applies to the majority of the countries, as an “alarming sign”. »Unfortunately, the ongoing pandemic again caused drastic restrictions in organized sport in 2021. For the second year in a row, our member clubs and all sports enthusiasts in Saxony were faced with an enormous challenge. The sometimes complete suspension of the organized sports system in the Free State has caused the clubs to suffer and the necessary perspectives to be lacking,” Franzen states.
In view of this, the German sports youth, together with the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, have put together a “catch-up package” that contains, among other things, 700 measures such as special introductory offers or special action days for sport. Most of them will be on June 25th and 26th in Berlin as part of the Finals 2022 and around the Olympic Stadium. The declared goal is to get around 200,000 children and young people moving in this way over the course of the year.
