POSTED: May 1st 2009

NewsUpdate

GAISF? No! Sportaccord . . .

KEIR RADNEDGE / Sports Features Communications

MILAN: Forget GAISF. Forget AGFIS. Forget headquarters in Monaco. Instead, think Sportaccord and think Lausanne. This, as revealed by Dutch IOC member Hein Verbruggen, is the new reality for the umbrella organisation for the world’s international sports federations.

Verbruggen, the 67-year-old former cycling and anti-doping campaigner, explained to AIPS Congress in Milan that a rebranding of the General Association of International Sports Federations had involved changing the name to Sportaccord. The Sportaccord event is to be known as the 'Sportaccord Convention' and will be managed separately as before.

He said: “Many of the international federations were set up as amateur organisations based on volunteers – and nowadays they are still based on volunteer work to a large extent.

“The trouble is that these international federations are often less professionally organised than most athletes, not to mention certain clubs in professional sport.”

Verbruggen pointed out that most sports are absent from the American market with its nation-specific professionalised leagues.

Continual challenges

He added: “At the same time we have other challenges such as the rapidly changing media environment – the role of TV and so on – the continual changing of the economic outlook with the crisis we now have and the issue of marketing is getting more complex; some of the international federations can address that but most can not.

“We also have the problems of doping, illegal betting and the confrontation with politicians – because politics is getting involved more and more and we becoming involved with Brussels on an international and a national level.”

International federations, said Verbruggen, have started to understand the almost prohibitively high costs of addressing such issues on their own and the value of working together. This had prompted the development of a new vision for GAISF or AGFIS – as Sportaccord.

Verbruggen added: “What is most important, however, about our new brand is the tag line on the logo: ‘Unite and support.’ This expresses what we want, what we are about.”

Common needs

The organisation is moving to Lausanne from Monaco so as to be close to the headquarters of many of its international federation membership.

He added: “We are setting up a new team there and identifying common needs. So we are setting up knowledge-sharing services for our members. For example, we have a lot of problems with the [European] laws coming out of Brussels which see sport as a mere economic activity. We want to play a very important role in discussing this with the various politicians.

“Then there is anti-doping. We have received a request from the IOC that Sportaccord should be involved in making all its international federations code-compliant. So we are setting up an anti-doping department to help support the federations so they avoid doing all the work individually.

“We’re also working on a multi-video platform for the small federations that cannot set up these things themselves to promote their sports; we’re pretty well advanced on this.”

Breakaway fears

Verbruggen suggested – without providing answers - that Sportaccord could help federations deal more effectively with the question of club breakaway movements. He also offered a potentially contentious vision of the organisation’s own events.

Verbruggen said: “We’ve seen a proliferation of events all around the world which is starting to be a major problem for our calendar. So we thought why don’t we master that a little better and start to set up our own events?”

Adding another layer of competitions to an over-crowded calendar might seem self-defeating but Verbruggen insisted that the first was already scheduled – a martial arts event in Beijing next year. Appropriate, bearing in mind the likely combat ahead for the new, expanded Sportaccord.

Keywords · GAISF · AGFIS · Sportaccord · Verbruggen · AIPS

For more information contact:
Laura Walden ()

All original materials contained in this section are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of Sports Features Communications, Inc the owner of that content. It is prohibited to alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.