Olympic cross-country skiing champion Veronika Stepanova in a column on , she supported Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal to create sports associations within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and also took the initiative to create private sports teams ski racing.
— President Putin recently proposed the creation of sports associations within the framework of the SCO, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Such associations could solve the main problem – to tear the sport away from the opinion of Western politicians, to bring it back to a normal and neutral state.
But that simply won’t be the case. In winter sports, almost all the top teams are European or North American. They won’t let us compete. This means that we must develop competitions between private teams, as in the KHL or the NHL. Yes, cross-country skiing is not hockey, but our budgets are completely different.
In the summer, a fairly well-known European skier wrote to me: already make commercial competitions, make a series of races so that the prizes cover the costs several times – we will come to you, what do we have to lose? Indeed, most ski federations in the same Europe are penniless. It will be extremely difficult for them to prevent an athlete from participating in our competitions, ”wrote Stepanova.
At the end of February, the executive committee of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) recommended that international federations not allow Russians and Belarusians to compete in events in Ukraine. Many federations followed the recommendations and suspended athletes from both countries.
Source : MatchTV
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