The project Victoria is back - part two

Zdroj: Sport Daily, Robert Kotian

Priority of the reform is to involve more children in sport
(Or two ways of reforming the Slovak sport)
 
Less than a year after the election, the Education Minister Eugen Jurzyca realized that the situation in Slovak sport is more complicated than he thought as a non-minister. He put together an expert team which prepared a project Victoria: Development and Popularization of Sports in 2005. In the meantime, the Slovak Olympic Committee led by President Frantisek Chmelár, issued a material "Sport in Slovakia and the conditions of its development,"  critical, depressive text commenting on the Slovak sport.

Victoria and Sport in Slovakia
Currently the minister´s expert team works on a separate material that addresses the most important problems of Slovak sport. And although Jozef Tokos, ministerial adviser and team leader himself admits that the material by the Olympic Committee names some of the problems very precisely, other statements in the document and the proposals to adopt different laws do not bear the signs of the strategic material.
 
"It is easier to name the problems and talk about them, than to come up with specific solutions. Government is also not expected to deal with question of what should the structure of sport movement look like. This is up to sport movement itself, "says Tokos.

Due to narrow aim and not solving the problems of sport from the complex perspective, the Victoria project had to face the criticism from the Sport Associations Confederation (SAC) in 2005. Also, SAC rejected the idea mentioned in Victoria project, that the state should support representation of top 15 sports. Today Tokos promotes the idea of ​​differentiated representation support, where the most popular and most successful sports get the most money from the state.

Resignation of Tokos´s team on complex problem solving in sport is probably intentional - in order to gradually, selectively, continually coming up with partial solutions. Tokoš however recognizes,: "If this document of SOC should serve as an inspiration for describing the problems, it is fulfilling its purpose."

Implications of life without movement
Tokos does not want to talk about the specific steps from the first important document of the reform - Development of Motional Activities of Children and Youth Strategy before it is sent to other ministries for comments.  All we know is that his basic goal is to get the children and youth exercise more during the PE classes and the time after school.  The organization of PE classes should change from achievement based to experience based.
 
Both of the documents mentioned above (Victoria and Sport in Slovakia..) state that about 1/3 of students apologize regularly from exercising during the PE classes, as it is not graded subject.  Children are neither led to sport by school, nor by family. The result is growing number of children with problems with muscles, bones and high blood pressure. Also the mental development of youth gets worse and drug usage grows.

The authors of Victoria have proposed several recommendations - to motivate schools or other subjects, to organize sports events for children and young people under 18 years after school hours. Increase the share of grants for this purpose significantly and compensate it with the decrease of share in other budget chapters. Money distributed in the competition would be divided by the following criteria: number of children engaged in sport activity, benefits of the activity (ie creativity, competitiveness, health effects, etc.) and reliability of the organizer.
 
Key people are the Keys
Basic knowledge that the sport in Slovakia is critical and it is high time to do something about it, is shared by both groups. In addition, the team of Jozef Tokos has two representatives of strong sports federations: hockey coach Filc and head of tennis Moška, so some spontaneous and coordinated cooperation of the two streams can be expected. Finally, the Tokos assumes that heads of sport associations will have the strategic documents available before the formal consultation process, so that they can enrich it with their thoughts.

As Tokos says, the public interest in sport is not defined yet and doing so is one of the first tasks of the team at the Ministry of Education. Even the material by SOC agrees to this fact.
 
It looks that the Slovak sports community is getting to the goal of improving the conditions of sport, in a number of ways.  Closer to the goal is currently probably the team around Minister Jurzyca and his chief adviser on sport Jozef Tokos.  He however states that “it is important to involve representatives of sports associations, because if the reform is successful, the critical rate of change will be ensured only if the key people in the sports movement identify with the ideas of this reform of sport."