Oleksandr Larin, Founder of ‘Idealist Media’ platform, General Secretary of the Basketball Federation of Ukraine (2011-2015), Deputy Minister of Sport of Ukraine (2010)

 

Some time ago when I acted as an adviser to one of the senior officials of the Ministry of Sport, he would frequently ask me: what is a key challenge the industry faces and how can one solve it quickly enough? My explanation was simple: there is no single and universal button one has to press, nor a wire rupture to be fixed to make the whole thing start working perfectly. One has to rise above the situation and to ask a question: what does the government expect from sport, why does it need it at all? The answer to this question was articulated in 2014. The government poses two requirements to the sport sector: a requirement for the health of the nation – through promoting physical activity (of not only children but across the board of the public), and a requirement for prestige – through impressive achievements in the global sport which consolidate and raise pride for the country and the feeling of engagement. At some point, these two challenges are as interrelated as communicating vessels though each of them is addressed in an individual manner. Respectively, the funding and management systems, everything associated with the fulfilment of the government’s tasks must be different and custom tailored to these tasks.

What makes Ukraine unique is the fact that here, all these things are like “two in one” and the sport functioning is essentially based on the old Soviet system. The government endeavours to promote sport from the top down to the bottom, through a multitude of Children’s and Youth Sport Schools (CYSS), advanced training schools, Olympic training centres, etc. whose functional structures are not a priori designed to meet the objective of retaining men and women in sports. By that token, they cannot serve as a tool of doing the job of ensuring the health of the nation through promoting physical activity across the public. A European model of sport advancement focused on public engagement and retention in sports operates differently, from bottom up to the top: people unite in sport clubs, clubs merge in sports federations while the government, instead of controlling and managing these federations, provides support to them with a variety of means – direct subsidies, grants, etc.

Technically, the way it is declared, this European model exists in Ukraine. The year 1951 on the eve of the USSR’s first participation in the Olympics, saw the establishment of international institutions like the Olympic Committee and sports federations (at the time they were referred to as sections). Obviously, these organizations were completely devoid of any public autonomy whether in decision making, or in teams formation, or coaches appointment: everything took place under stiff control of the Communist Party and the government. Essentially, their functioning was in no way different from any other domain in the USSR.

Upon gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine inherited this system and ever since, it has not changed much except that instead of the Communist Party, the leverage is exercised by the Ministry of Sport. Due to the direly low budgets and malfunctioning economy, as well as due to the absence of all those mechanisms working in the Western countries and allowing to replenish federations’ budgets (sponsorship, TV rights, transfers from international federations, marketing revenues from national competitions, membership fees and the like), budget appropriations remain the only source of financial support for most federations fuelling athletes’ trainings and participation in international tournaments. European countries also run state programmes of support to the highest achievements sport in pursuit of delivering the state requirement of promoting the country’s image. However, they do it by implementing a grants system whereby federations receive ad hoc grants and report about their use. In contrast, Ukraine still adheres to a perfectly Soviet system: the Ministry possesses total control, i.e. state budget funding and refrains from distributing it in the form of grants which will then be audited. In many federations, top executives are fulltime officials of the Ministry or agencies associated with it. This mechanism allows unlimited control over federations. All this is a compelling illustration of our system’s incompatibility with the Olympic charter and the basic pillars on which the global sport system is built.

How does this system affect the implementation of the state requirement to assure the health of the nation? As the generally accessible data suggest, in 2019 (I am referring to these data as it was the last pre-Covid year in which credible and accurate picture was drawn), as few as just 13 % of Ukrainians were engaged in physical activities. The Strategy of Physical Culture and Sport Promotion Up To 2028 approved by the Cabinet in 2020 provides for a quantum leap – the number of Ukrainians regularly engaged in physical activities is aimed to increase to 30 %. There is a lot of doubt that the set goal is achievable, that the strategy rests on realistic prerequisites and that the available toolbox will allow to make it happen.

What distinguishes CYSS from a club? A CYSS is about a system of selecting gifted athletes. Its efficacy depends on the cadre talent and quality but in essence, it is nothing but selection: first you pick as many as possible kids (which is called an elementary training group) and each subsequent year you promote only those boys and girls who have demonstrated some promising results. This principle is approved by the government. Nonetheless, in light of the goals set out by the Strategy expected to support sport through enhancement of the CYSS material resources and cadre, it should be understood that the focus is made on the tool working to reduce the number of people engaged in sport activities.

Unlike a CYSS, a club survives at the expense of membership fees and it is by default interested in making you and your family join it and stay its member forever, irrespective of whether or not you can perform spectacularly. Inasmuch as you or your kids deliver fantastic results, win a championship or even Olympics, it is a huge benefit for a club, additional prestige, ad contracts and all the bonuses that come along with having a sport star as your club member. However, in general terms, the club does not really care about how you perform. Alongside that, the club continuously has its membership using its facilities and resources, paying for coaches’ and other specialists’ services. So, the club has its direct interest in retaining as many as possible members and in having these bring new applicants along. For that matter, the club offers a variety of incentives, fun and services to its loyal users, like nutritionist consultancy, general PT coaching, etc. This is the right and effective model.

When we launched the sport system reformation in 2014, we were accused of an intention to do away with CYSSs. God forbid! The truth is that a CYSS fails to address the key goal of retaining people in sports. As we examine the statistics of CYSS participants on the first and on the last years, we see how intensively this selection mechanism is working. Everyone who failed to move to the next level, was in fact kicked out and forgotten for good. The government must create real incentives for the people motivating them to go in for sports. In Sweden populated by 10 million, the number of clubs reaches 19 thousand, in Germany with its almost 83 million, this index is nearly 90 thousand. Alongside clubs, these countries also offer the so called academies which to a certain extent may be compared with our CYSS and which are focused on selecting talents and making them real stars.

In our case however, as long as we claim that we are pursuing two goals, one cannot expect that one technique can address them at a time. Ukraine absolutely lacks real mechanisms which would power the viability of the environment engaging and retaining people in sport, i.e. clubs and federations mechanisms. A lot of words but no viable programmes while the existing system is aimed at preserving the Soviet status quo with certain polite bows to Europe.

A classical sport model is pyramid-shaped with mass sport activities in the bottom and narrowing upward as the number of participants shrinks leaving only highest achievements athletes on the top. Some European countries have articulated a mission of transforming a pyramid into a rectangle in which the number of participants in the bottom will be equal to that on the top, in other words retention of everybody yet in different capacities. It makes a perfect sense as it it the only right approach to implementing the government requirement for the health of the nation.

There are other serious challenges however: demographic declines plus numerous alternatives to active sports that sprouted out in past decades – computer games and other activities complicating the goal of involving citizens in sports, promoting their love of sport and an ability to enjoy it. Social ads and commercials can be countless but one should not expect them to make the difference. Unless a person has his or her hands-on experience and sees no chance to gain it, no social promo campaign can bring about any change. There is only one age group which can be embraced by physical activity in a systemic way allowing for its monitoring and control – it is a school age. Thus, the fulfilment of this task may only be approached through developing a habit for and understanding of sport in the junior age which simultaneously calls for the emergence of tools for the parallel engagement of other age groups.

There is a widespread stereotype that the Soviet model fosters the massive demand for sport but it is an easily refuted misconception. Should one compare the generally accessible statistics of the numbers of CYSS participants and those covered by the elementary training against the ones who achieved the top class, the difference is more than 100-fold. What does it lead to conclude? Even if the primary selection is to envelop not 279 thousand but the whole 3 million, each new step will see their drop-out and this shrinkage is pre-programmed. In other words, it is not a tool of retaining people in sport, as it is hard to believe that those who dropped out of this system at initial stages will experience love of sport for the rest of their lives. As long as the focus will remain on this CYSS model without providing real support to federations, without offering real incentives to the club system and introduction of new tools unavailable in the country, Ukraine will remain quite far from making this quantum leap.