"Imagine", many telephone conversations among sports fans began on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"Imagine if Stephan Mayer had become president." Presumably, the CSU MP from Altötting should have given up the office, as he did on Tuesday with the position of Secretary General of the CSU.

Scandalous and intolerable are Mayer's insults and threats against a journalist who had reported on his supposed double standards, manifested in a child whose paternity he does not accept.

Recommendation of the former Federal President

The cup passed the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) by a hair's breadth, one might say.

Former Federal President Christian Wulff, in his role as chairman of a selection committee, recommended Mayer as well as two other candidates.

The delegates could choose from among these with a clear conscience, Wulff said in a radio interview in November;

all three have a good chance of restoring confidence in the media, in politics, among athletes and volunteers, and in bringing about unity.

The former head of state expressly contradicted the prospect of Mayer having to take a waiting period between government work and involvement in the association, as stipulated in the Federal Ministers Act.

A few days later, Mayer surprised at the end of a twenty-minute, as many of those present judged: brilliant introductory speech by renouncing his candidacy.

That was mid-November in Düsseldorf.

Two weeks later, at the general assembly in Weimar, Mayer was there again, this time as a candidate for the vice presidency and equipped with election recommendations from Bavaria and the team sports.

He got 257 votes out of 416, at least 62 percent.

In January, the expected decision from Berlin that his waiting period would last until December 2022 forced him to resign from Thomas Weikert's presidency before he had even taken office.

No one could have foreseen the escalation and its consequences, which the Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder described on Wednesday as a human tragedy, no question.

But the back and forth and the flawed process make it clear how desperately the sport is struggling for candidates to take on all the volunteer work that needs to be done.

The job at the top is possibly still one of the most attractive, but in Weimar 2021 only two of the initial three were available, only one was present in person.

The sport urgently needs to think about how and from where it recruits qualified personnel for its many, many management positions, Causa Mayer just reminds us.