The most recent episode in the dispute about the extent of the “culture of fear” in the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) cannot surprise anyone.
Neither the plausible-looking complaints of the athletes' representative Jonathan Koch, who tried to be correct, nor the counter-speech about the "dirty game".
Everything together must give the final impulse to carefully work through this theater. Just to be able to draw a good lesson from it. How can such a development be prevented in the future? Because the damage to sport is immense. More than ever, he needs a strong voice of integrity if he is to be heard on the most important issues.
The designers of organized sport would have to look forward to Saturday as a possible turning point in Weimar. If the pandemic still allows the general meeting, including new elections, in quick succession (three hours including the presentation of all candidates). Whoever wins the race, the favored Thomas Weikert from table tennis or the fencing president Claudia Bokel: The new leadership must unite, rebuild what separated the old one, and even destroyed it. Above all, trust. That alone is a Herculean task.
But even before the beginning, this eminently important carer work is made more difficult by the opaque struggles for a position in the new beginning committee. Jörg Ammon, the President of the Bavarian State Sports Association, confirmed to the FAZ on Tuesday that he would no longer run for Vice President. The reason is a complaint from members of the presidium of his association to the Munich public prosecutor's office, which the "Spiegel" published over the weekend.
Ammons critics call on the authority to examine whether the association's statutes were violated in a criminal offense when awarding contracts worth millions in 2014 for modernization. Will the complaint lead to a trial, an indictment, let alone a conviction? Nobody knows. The only thing that is certain is that after Ammons retreat, he remains the spokesman for the state sports federations, a kind of opposing candidate from the west of the republic was puffed up informally with comments - not from Bavaria.
Viewed from a distance, this game does not serve the quality of the longed-for new catch, but rather calls into question the urgently needed overcoming of the Hörmann culture.
For this, the people acting in the background have to develop what they preach as the source of all success: team spirit as salvation in the greatest leadership crisis in the association's history.
If the DOSB is to be able to even come close to meeting the enormous challenges, the long foreseeable fatal consequences of the pandemic, it needs a resilient consensus, a large unit, from head to toe.
Otherwise it will break.