Month: September 2018

With this post I would like to give the confidence to the representatives of Member Federations before the vote on the 2019-20 budget on the IOF General Assembly next weekend. I know that for people with no finance background it often looks like a daunting task to interpret financial statements and have confidence in their decision. So I would like to assure them that based on the IOF’s track record for the past 10 years, and especially for the past 2 years since the 2016 General Assembly, their vote doesn’t matter.

No matter how Members Federations vote, the IOF Leadership will spend the money the way they want, independent of the GA approved budget.

In this post I will quickly review the past, present and future of IOF finances as presented on recent General Assemblies.

Continued historic underperformance

The publication of the 2017 results and the forecast for the 2018 published in the Congress Binder have confirmed the remarkable feat achieved:

The IOF Leadership has missed the budget target set by themselves for 10 years in a row.

I wrote about this earlier here and here, the numbers published for the 2018 General Assembly just confirmed the expectations.

Not only the continued underperformance against their own budget targets set by themselves may come close to a Guinness Record, but the results were poor also in absolute terms.

The IOF has lost a total of €114,000 since 2009, and €38,500 since 2013.

Ignoring the approved budget looks like a recently established culture of the IOF Presidents. It started under Åke with unpublished promotions that very likely had budgetary impact, continued by Brian just informing the Council that he decided to overstep the approved budget to fund an exhibition on the SportAccord convention, and continued further by Leho who started to revise the 2017 budget already in October 2016, within two months after its approval (as discussed below).

Complete wipe out of the 2016 GA promises

Leho, as freshly elected President promised a period of plenty on the 2016 General Assembly, with highly profitable years coming starting from 2016. The result resembled the words of Chernomyrdin, the late Russian Prime Minister:

We wanted to do it better, but the outcome was the usual

For the avoidance of doubt, the plus zero result (or 0.2% of the promised total profit of the total of three years 2016-18) was not due to spending all the money on development projects. The reason for underperformance were the complete misjudgement of revenues, and overspend on some expenses, like the World Games (€10,000 planned, €29,306 spent in 2017).

Unfortunately, this poor state of IOF financials contributes to the bad feeling that there was an incentive for the IOF leadership to spend monies collected for anti-doping activities of the IOF differently than the original intention.

Continue reading “IOF Financials – the past is dark, the future is unclear”

(This post has been updated with information received from the Portuguese organisers of the 2016 World MTBO Championships. The updates are shown in the text in blue)

I always believed that the anti-doping fight was too important a matter to be left to the anti-doping officers, to paraphrase Clemenceau’s famous assertion that war is too important a matter to be left to the generals.

Yet, I always found it difficult to have a meaningful discussion about it with Brian and the Council when I was the Chair of the MTBO Commission. Their argument was, of course, that anti-doping matters are highly confidential. That is obviously a very relevant point regarding specific tests, but I could never figure out the reason for their reluctance to discuss anti-doping strategy and finance. Were they hiding their lack of understanding and unwillingness to learn about the topic? Or were they simply reluctant to engage in meaningful discussions?

To the deepest regret of most top managers, questions do not disappear just because they do not want to talk about them. This applies also to the IOF’s anti-doping activity, and the more one scratches the surface the more questions pop up. In this post I will share with you some observations that suggests that all is not well. I have more facts about MTBO for the simple reason that I talk to most athletes and organisers in that discipline, but both anecdotal evidence and data available suggests that there are similar questions across all disciplines of the IOF.

Fewer AD tests

There was a sharp drop in the number of AD tests for MTBO athletes commissioned by the IOF. There is no official data available, but MTBO is a  small community (a bit like FootO was in the 80s and 90s), and people talk to each other.

 

Some explanation: OOC stands for out of competition, IC stands for in competition. The peak in 2016 was achieved in a hybrid year of financing when the IOF leadership introduced flat taxes (or “donations”, as they call it), instead of  just surprising the organisers on the event by the number of AD tests to be paid for. The Portuguese World Championship organisers were asked if they wanted to pay the then newly set fee of €4000 according to the new AD financing system, or pay for the tests as requested by the IOF according to the old system. Knowing that typical number of tests requested would  cost less than €4000, the Portuguese elected to pay themselves. They had the pleasure to pay for a record number of 27 AD tests on 18 athletes, far the highest ever requested by the IOF on a single World MTBO Championships. That cost the Portuguese organisers at around €6500, including doctors’ fee. There was a strong feeling that the IOF took advantage of the situation that the Portuguese elected to go by the old system. This feeling of being taken advantage of was strengthened, when both in 2017 and 2018 the IOF paid only for 8 tests (i.e. less then third that of ordered in 2016) on the World MTBO Championships, despite collecting a record amount of €5000 and €5500 from the organisers.

Anecdotal evidence from FootO elite athletes suggests that recently there was also a sharp drop in AD tests on major FootO events.

Unfortunately, the hard facts available also point to the same directions. The number of athletes in the IOF Registered Testing Pool has dropped by over 60% in 2 years. The number of FootO athletes dropped from 8 to 3 between 2016 and 2018. These are the athletes who have to report their whereabouts in WADA’s ADAMS system, that is, these are the athletes who can get an out of competition AD tests ordered by the IOF. You may find the lists of the registered athletes here.

 

But this is not the end of the story.

Continue reading “IOF Anti-Doping activity questions”