Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Physical Culture and Sports Dmitry Svishchev said that Russia should receive compensation for the transition of skaters Diana Davis And Gleb Smolkina to another team, because money from the country’s budget was spent on their training.
In June, the Georgian Figure Skating Federation confirmed that Russian ice dance silver medalists Davis and Smolkin will represent the Georgian national team from the 2023/24 season.
– In this case, it would be fair for the State to receive compensation. This applies to all such incidents in general. If an athlete prepared for state money and decided to leave, he must compensate for this money. We discussed this issue on a large scale last week. Now we may be drafting a bill to compensate the athlete for the costs that the state has spent on him. It is important to note that it is the state, not even the federation, but the state! It’s taxpayers’ money.
An athlete comes to school, the club first spends on him, pays the coach, the staff. He is paid for ice rinks, sports facilities. Then he becomes a member of the national team, receives a salary, becomes the bet of the sports training system, spends money on training camps, competitions, doctors, coaches, a huge amount. The whole machine works to make an athlete great. He becomes a star and decides to leave the country. It makes perfect sense when a country offers an athlete to go and wants to get a ready-made champion, and our state has been investing money for years and then lets that state offset the costs.
You can understand an athlete leaving. Well, he’s not ready to wait, he wants to leave, he has no patience and no affection for his homeland. Well, then please offset the costs. The state should spend the money returned for the training of this athlete to continue raising champions,” Svishchev told Sport24.
Davis and Smolkin are silver medalists of the Russian Championship, participants of the 2022 Olympics in Beijing. The skaters train in the United States and did not compete nationally last season.
sport24.ru
Source : MatchTV
I’m John White and I’m an experienced journalist working in the news industry. My specialty is covering sports news, which I’ve been doing for over 6 years now. During this time, I have worked as an author with Athletistic, a popular online news website focusing on sports topics.
