Dhe association Athleten Deutschland surprised the sports committee of the Bundestag with revolutionary proposals for the promotion of top-class sports. Managing director Johannes Herber and Maximilian Klein, the representative for international sports policy, suggested on Wednesday in Berlin that an innovation budget be created, for example, from which athletes who do not want to join the centralized structures of their associations can be supported.
As examples of successful isolated solutions, they named Olympic gymnastics champion Fabian Hambüchen, decathlon world and European champion Niklas Kaul, rowing world champion Oliver Zeidler and beach volleyball player Karla Borger, who chairs Athletes Germany. Sports policy spokesman for the Union parliamentary groups, Stephan Mayer, called the idea “daredevil” and warned against abandoning the general centralization of top athletes.
Athletes have to face the competition every day, but there is no competition in the system, Klein criticized. Athleten Deutschland calls for the effectiveness of bases, performance centers and support concepts to be evaluated. Top athletes would have to be supported with more money in order to have purchasing power and thus freedom of choice over top-class sport facilities; it is important to end their monopoly.
Support for athletes could be based on the model of the Federal Training Support Act (BAföG) and reward professional training and studies in addition to sport and sporting success. In addition to bases and associations, bidding initiatives should be promoted. Dysfunctional incentive control should be stopped; as such, subject to scientific evaluation, could prove to be the Bundeswehr’s promotion of top-level sports and concepts for young people with the aim of being as successful as possible in adolescence.
Athletes Germany presented “30 suggestions for a holistic development of athletes” on Wednesday; they are headed: “So that everyone wins”. The organization is trying to influence the reform of the failed elite sport reform of 2016. Four weeks ago, the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) and the Ministry of the Interior described the common goal of creating an independent agency to finance and control top-class Olympic sports in a “rough concept”; it is to be created on the basis of a sports promotion act.
