If you want to prevent something, you set up a working group.
What does the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) want to achieve, which has established three working groups with various sub-circles for its content, structural and personnel realignment?
One could believe: the big hit.
But one can also fear that the diligence in meeting and voting will lead to the opposite.
The state of affairs is that DOSB President Alfons Hörmann has been the proverbial lame duck since the recommendation of the ethics committee headed by Thomas de Maizière that he should face a vote of confidence by means of new elections - a president on call.
But the departure that his association and its representatives are calling for seems inhibited.
The general assembly in December can only elect a new presidium if the current one resigns completely.
It doesn't look like that.
Only Hörmann and his deputy Kaweh Niroomand have announced that they will give up their offices and no longer run for office.
But even this is so far nothing more than an announcement.
New elections in December
The prospect of the big hit at the end of the Olympic year 2021 is bleak. If even a single member of the Presidium insists on exhausting the term of office for which it has been elected, the vacant positions, according to the statutes, will only be filled by by-elections until the regular new election in December 2022, including the presidency. As with the departure of the first DOSB President Thomas Bach to Lausanne to head the International Olympic Committee, it is even possible for the Presidium to appoint a President.
Which candidate, which candidate from outside the inner circle of German sports officials would want to do this to themselves, especially since painful reforms are on the sport-political agenda: Sport must get out of its isolation fixated on the Olympics and, as its helplessness during the Corona crisis showed, establish it as a socio-political force. Some functionaries want, but there is no consensus in the working groups, to give up the departmental principle in the Presidium and oblige its individual members to supervise the board more than to publicly represent it. And he has to do something with the half-finished elite sports reform. Anyone who tackles these issues risks being re-elected after twelve months.
The umbrella organization of German sport can only start stronger in a quarter of a year if every single member of the executive committee stands for new elections. A difficult, perhaps even impossible challenge: shaping through resignation.