If you get involved with the sleazy kids of international sport, you shouldn't count on the taxpayer paying for the trip as well.
Almost three weeks after the Winter Olympics in China, this is a fresh political approach.
On Wednesday, the Interior Ministry informed sports federations that it will not provide any grants for participation in competitions with competitors from Russia and Belarus, countries that invaded their neighbor Ukraine almost two weeks ago and got involved in a terrible war.
Autonomy of sport or not: the state says where to go.
One cannot help but get the impression that this is necessary, although most organizations have long rejected top-level sport with Russians and Belarusians.
But some still believe they can stay in the running with the neutrality gesture.
The jerseys of the so-called neutral athletes and the team of the Russian Olympic Committee, the clothing decorated with state insignia, only served to cover up the indecisiveness of the International Olympic Committee.
World sport's most important body allowed Russian athletes to compete at the Rio and Pyeongchang Games, Tokyo and most recently Beijing, even though their country organized systematic doping and brazenly betrayed the sports world at the 2014 Winter Games.
Now, in front of everyone else, the German Swimming Association (DSV) is faced with the question of how it feels about the supposed neutrality.
At the World Championships in July in Budapest and also at events in open water swimming, diving and water polo, the world association wants to allow neutral athletes from Russia and Belarus.
As is intended in judo, cycling, biathlon and skateboarding.
Does the DSV want to accept this and travel at their own expense?
Or should he enforce the exclusion, as was the case at the Paralympics?
The taxpayer expects an answer.
One could recall the introduction of the anti-doping law in 2015 as a reminder that sport, despite years of opposition, cannot get away with settling all its problems within the family.
This is not only due to the economic dependence of many sports on the state.
This is also due to the social importance of sport.
The Interior Minister, that was in 2018 and his name was de Maizière, decided once before that he would not pay for a German team to travel to the European Games in Minsk, with which dictator Lukashenko wanted to give his dirty regime a shine.
It turned out differently.
With the declaration that it was about qualifying for the Olympic Games, the then President of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, Hörmann, persuaded the successor de Maizières, his party friend Seehofer.
So now the next attempt by the biggest sponsor of German sport.
It is the federal government that is trying to prevent Germany's best, athletes like Sarah and Florian Wellbrock, from having to jump in at the deep end.
With competitors whose home countries are ostracized in the world for their deadly attack on Ukraine.
Every sports association should have recognized this long ago.