The list of failures is long.

The time to fix them is short.

While on Saturday the Presidium and Board of Directors of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) dealt with the reports of five working groups on the content, structure and staffing of the association, on Sunday the professional associations and on Monday the state sports federations, it becomes clear that the President who are to be re-elected by the general assembly in Weimar on December 4th, will initially take office for a single year.

Michael Reinsch

Correspondent for sports in Berlin.

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This was confirmed on Sunday by the initiators of the process, Jörg Ammon and Ingo Weiss, President of the Bavarian State Sports Association and President of the German Basketball Association. "By-elections and subsequent appointments apply to all organs and committees for the current electoral period," says Paragraph 9 of Paragraph 27 of the DOSB statutes. If you wanted to elect the new presidium for the usual four-year term, the statutes would have to be changed.

This will pose the problem of the search committee headed by former Federal President Christian Wulff not only to find someone for the honorary office, but also to prepare the personality to stand for election both at the end of 2021 and at the end of 2022; then the electoral term of the presidium of Alfons Hörmann ends. He does not want to follow the recommendation of the ethics committee of his house and to be expressed by a new election, but has announced that he will be stepping down to the general meeting. Weiss says that this is not even necessary. The Presidium had planned the new election for the agenda; this implies that all members are newly elected.

The long-standing chairman of the sports committee in the Bundestag, SPD MP Dagmar Freitag, pointedly summed up the tasks that await the successor to Hörmann, who has been in office since 2013, at the #Neuland event in Aachen last week: "There will be a need for a personality It doesn't matter whether it's a man or a woman who first sweeps up the pieces. ”Anyone who is aware of the extent of the disaster will think twice about whether he or she wants to do this to himself. At the national level, sport is down, she said, addressing the “largely broken relationship with Berlin politics” as well as the relationship with the media.

Internationally, the umbrella organization must be respected again.

Such sharp findings and more can be found in the detailed reports of three subgroups on structure and two more on content and personnel.

Superficially, it is about plans and projects.

But in reality the lyrics are a relentless balance sheet.

It is devastating.

The crisis of the DOSB is based on the too strong focus on the self-interest of the umbrella organization, it is said at one point.

Accordingly, errors and omissions affect society beyond the structure of sports organizations.

Children no longer mastered the basic elements of movement, they say, but the public and the association paid too little attention to this.

The deficits endangered the development of young people.

The pandemic has exacerbated the problem.

"More attention and resources need to be devoted to the topics of 'movement for children and young people' and 'space for movement', and this across all pillars of the association," writes the working group's content orientation.

DOSB and youth sports are called upon to understand the topic as a cross-sectional task and to contribute to making it a task for society as a whole to enable children and young people to exercise and thus contribute to the future viability of a healthy society.

The working group calls for cooperation between clubs and schools and kindergartens, lobbying for this issue in politics, with parents and, last but not least, in sport itself. They also encourage sport to become a social actor and establish social enterprises.

After the focus on top-class sport and its reform, which has yet to be completed, the DOSB should now pay at least equal attention to the diverse concerns of sport for everyone, including the sport of people who are not organized in the 90,000 sports clubs. A member of the board should therefore be entrusted with the subject of sports development again and supported by a strengthened department. After Karin Fehres' resignation, the DOSB did not fill her position again; The chairwoman of the board, Veronika Rücker, took on responsibility for sports development.

In the presidium, the department principle is to be abolished so that it works better as a supervisory board. So far, five areas of responsibility have been named: competitive sport, mass sport / sport development, economy / finance, education / Olympic upbringing and women / equality. In order to strengthen overall responsibility in the Presidium, the focus on one subject area should be ended.

On the subject of protection from (sexual) violence, the discussion at the DOSB is bypassed. The Greens and Union have included the Center for Safe Sport, which challenges athletes in Germany, in their election programs. The Federal Ministry of the Interior is planning a feasibility study. The DOSB did not take up the athletes' impulse paper, a dialogue did not take place or only partially. Conclusion of the working group content: "Instead, organized sport seems caught between public opinion, political will and rigid procedures."