POSTED: March 26th 2010
NewsUpdate
IAAF athletics bosses hear wake-up call over looming financial crisis
NEIL WILSON / Sports Features Communications
LONDON, Mar 26: Jean Poczobut, the IAAF honorary treasurer, has warned its council that unless it stops spending tens of millions of dollars more than its income it is facing financial ruin within four years.
His warning was given to its council at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month during the World Indoor Championships. Insiders greeted the Frenchman’s four-year financial projections with a mixture of shock and horror.
Those who heard his warning say he deliberately painted the worst possible scenario to force their acceptance of the need for huge cutbacks in spending. He put income at $45m and current expenditure at $30m more.
An extraordinary meeting of the IAAF’s executive board, chaired by president Lamine Diack has been called for May to discuss an “austerity budget” for next year and beyond. The council will be asked to accept it at its next meeting in August.
Prize money and record bonuses at IAAF events which is at its maximum of $7.336m at its biennial world championships may be threatened but at most risk is the IAAF development programme for Africa and Asia.
Declining television and marketing revenue, which make up almost 90pc of its income, has hit the IAAF. Networks such as BBC and ZDF did not screen the IAAF world indoor championships this month and are not screening Sunday’s world cross country championships in Poland.
Diack announced when he was last re-elected president that he would not stand again in 2011. Vice-presidents Sergy Bubka and Sebastian Coe and council member Nawal el Moutawakel, the 1984 Olympic 400m hurdles champion, are seen as the most likely successors who will have to deal with the financial challenges ahead.
NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books.
Keywords · IAAF · Diack · Coe · Bubka · El Moutawakel · Poczobut
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