Slovak sport lacks substance under its "roof"

A national umbrella organization for Slovak sport is undoubtedly necessary. Unified external representation, an internal platform for the movement, and execution of useful coordination tasks should have existed long ago. It’s time to break the string of failed efforts by various entities, such as the Slovak Association of Physical Culture, the Confederation of Sports Federations, or the now-defunct Slovak Union of Sport.

From the outset of presenting the first results of this “roof” initiative, sports officials placed too much emphasis on formalities: name, membership, voting rights—while almost nothing was said about the substance of its activities. Since the initial theses published more than a quarter-year ago, the July general assembly of the Slovak Olympic Committee (SOV) brought not only a change in name but also in the concept of membership for this new organization. It would no longer be an association (SOŠA) but a committee (SOŠV). Initially, SOŠA was to “possibly” include individual members, with the "cornerstone" being the individual, especially athletes, who would become members by joining a club and paying an annual fee. But the idea of “automatic membership” in SOŠA for athletes upon club enrollment was both practically flawed and legally questionable. By July, the proposal had shifted: “no new organization would be created; SOV would simply change its name and amend its statutes.”

According to the draft statutes, SOŠV members would include not only sports federations and athlete representatives, but also “organizations and institutions that contribute to fulfilling the tasks of the Olympic movement and developing sport in the Slovak Republic, and have been approved by SOŠV’s general assembly.” In this envisioned national sports front, Olympic sports would hold two votes each, while non-Olympic sports and other members would have one vote. The presidents of the football and hockey federations (SFZ and SZĽH), representing football and hockey, would have a combined four votes—the same as, say, two athletes and the heads of two small non-Olympic federations.

The expected rejection of the transformation from SOV to SOŠV by the SFZ conference introduced two options. But creating a “roof” without football is absurd. What remains is to accept a few months’ or even a year’s delay and return to a patient and honest substantive discussion. A temporary withdrawal by SOV is not the solution.

Even if an agreement on establishing a "roof" were reached, nothing would immediately change. The sporting movement is relatively good at describing its problems—but finding effective solutions is much harder. For years, the go-to demands have been the same triad: more funding, lottery revenues, tax breaks. Many of sport’s problems—and vague solutions—were already addressed by the 2008 National Conference on Elite Sport. One recommendation from fall 2012 still resonates: “Make the financing system more efficient and transparent. Apply a differentiated approach to financing different sports and athletes, based on a categorization of sports.” SOV repeated these same problems in a slightly reworded form over a year ago in its document “Sport in the Slovak Republic and the Conditions for its Development.”

The demands of the First Sports Forum in March 2012 laid bare the movement’s struggle to come up with substantive solutions. After another year of intellectual effort, the main output was vague fluff—such as asking the government to define the public and national interest in sport. But shouldn't at least a weak attempt to define public interest have come from the athletes themselves at the forum—even if different from Jurzyca’s definition of “engaging youth in sport and achieving the highest possible number of major successes in the most popular sports”?

The forum's call for legislative changes met a simple counter-question: how? In most cases, no answer followed. A few concrete proposals ignored the broader context (like tax relief), were disputable, unsubstantiated by analysis, or outright unacceptable (e.g., allocating lottery funds outside of state control, or creating a fourth elite sports center under the Ministry of Finance). One particularly fanciful idea was the proposal to create a sports fund to manage state resources allocated to sport. To be managed. Would be managed.

According to Minister Čaplovič, “proposals should come from the bottom up, not be imposed from above.” Yet when his ministry scrapped Jurzyca’s mandated three PE classes per week—a plan meant to be gradually implemented alongside a reform of PE curriculum—there was no visible response from any future SOŠV entity. Only PE teachers and experts voiced concern from the “bottom.” The minister’s expectations can only be met if the voice of the sports movement changes in nature—if substance finally outweighs vote-counting in SOŠV; if convincing arguments prevail over recycled talking points heard after every hockey success or those dating back decades; if the priority becomes adopting clear, criteria-based rules for state funding based on the social value of sport, rather than securing the fastest personal access to the minister or prime minister (a relevant point for football as well, after the SFZ conference and the revived talk of channeling billions of tax funds via PPP into a national football stadium).

When sound rules accepted by both the state and the entire sporting movement become more important than, say, the call made at SOV’s July meeting to “fight for money, fight for a different type of money—not just subsidies,” only then can Slovak sport hope to gain not just a roof, but a solid foundation beneath it.