For many years, we knew Aleksandar Samoilov as a top-level beach volleyball player, but this summer he got into his new position rather unexpectedly.
“When we realized that we would not make it to the Nations Cup and would not continue the fight for the Olympic Games, I decided to take a two-week break to think about what I would do in life. The position of an athlete is like a ballet dancer or a firefighter. In your 40s, you seem to be still young as a man, but you are retired in your profession. If you haven’t built a dual career, you haven’t got education in parallel, it’s a very difficult moment. Even with all the education, it is difficult because the athlete does not already have any work experience. Basically, we are completely defenseless,” reveals Samoilov, who received several higher educations during his career. “I know well how an athlete thinks in his prime. At that point, I’m invulnerable and will exercise forever, what other social guarantees?! At that time, I didn’t even know who a family doctor was and what he did. At the age of 40, when you already have a couple of children, serious injuries appear that can knock you out of action for even a year or a half, suddenly you have to look for new opportunities to survive and provide for your family.”
So, during this two-week reflection period, Samoilovs looked at business plans, but found out that there is a vacancy in the Sports Department. “I thought about it and applied, and then everything happened incredibly quickly.”
The former athlete says that he originally wanted to start working from November until he received a call asking him if he could start working the next day. “Everyone around me said I was crazy, that this is a place where people are abandoned under a tank, but someone has to take it. Someone has to become a leader who can lead this team forward. In recent years, it has been heard more than once that there is a lack of leadership in sports management. If we, the athletes ourselves, do not accept these challenges, leadership will not be formed by itself.”
As his first goal, Samoilov has set increasing the total budget for the sports industry. “Not only the state budget, but to work on it to create opportunities to attract the private sector significantly more. There are sports federations that live almost exclusively on the state budget, and there are federations in which state funding makes up only a tenth of the total budget. It is necessary to understand why one federation is able to raise funds and another cannot. The possibilities are already different – sponsors, participants’ contributions or international federation funding and incentives. It is often just a matter of management and good governance,” says the athlete, at the same time expressing the unpopular opinion that sport in Latvia is sufficiently well supported.
However, for progress to happen, the sports industry needs to work together. “We must understand that we are all in the same boat and we are all building a sports society. If everyone will constantly pull the deck to their side and try to get the greatest benefit for themselves at any cost, there will be no development. You can already point the finger at other federations for some of their failures or the actions of their leaders, but in the end it is viewed from the outside as a common failure of the entire sports community. People outside the industry don’t care in which sport the ugliness happened. We are all perceived as athletes, regardless of whether we are volleyball players, bobsledders or basketball players,” says the head of the Sports Department.
“As an athlete, to be honest, I had no feeling that we could not divide something within the sports industry, however, when I came here, I started talking to different people, unfortunately we have to conclude that the sports industry is one of the most divided in Latvia. I don’t even know why, but over the years, opposing fronts have formed in sports, which fight with each other, and often do not separate resources. This is well demonstrated by the fact that various problematic issues are often not resolved in mutual discussions, but immediately thrown into the media. Perhaps it can be achieved faster, but it usually does more harm than good to the industry,” says Samoilovs, citing as an example the case when the Latvian Volleyball Federation publicly fought for funding for the U20 national team this summer. “Already after the first discussion, people said: if it is not resolved here and now, then that’s it – we’re going to the media!”
Read the full interview with Alexander Samoilov Sports Newspapers in the September issue, which can be found in the best newsstands only this week.
Source: www.diena.lv
