WUC 2010 : An Excellent Year

From left to right: Sinisa Jasnic, Chair of the CTI WUC, Eric Saintrond, FISU Secretary General/CEO, Nicole Mangelschots, Assistant to the WUC dept and Laurent Briel, WUC Director

An Excellent World University Championships Year!

Last Wednesday, Mr. Sinisa Jasnic, Chair of the CTI World University Championships, paid a visit to the FISU headquarters in order to meet with Eric Saintrond, FISU Secretary General/CEO, Laurent Briel, World University Championships Director and Nicole Mangelschots, Assistant to the World University Championships Dpt. (Mr. Matjaz Pecovnik, Vice-Chair of the CTI World University Championships did not attend the meeting).

At this occasion, Mr. Jasnic gave us his comments about this 2010 World University Championships year.

S.J.: “In general we can be very satisfied with the 2010 WUC edition. In several sports, we broke some participation records, but we also faced some problems. Most of these problems came from late cancellations and this is one of the reasons for today’s meeting. Together with Mr. Saintrond and Mr. Briel, we are thinking about the way we will be able to protect the future organisers. We made some recommendations that we will propose to the next Executive Committee. We are not referring to sanction – I do not like this word – but about financial conditions linked to the registration process.

I am also very happy with the excellent relations we continue to build with the International Sports Federations involved in our championships program. Indeed, it is a real pleasure to work with these FSI in order to promote their sport and the university spirit around the world. And I can tell you that year after year we still have more and more candidates willing to enter our WUC program. This is also an important topic we have to tackle very carefully: how to accept new sports? FISU needs to establish a precise procedure for this in order to guarantee that the first WUC of a new discipline will be successful.

The same goes with our National University Sport Federations. More and more countries are bidding for the organisation of a championship. In a way, this is very positive but we need to evaluate all of the candidatures very thoroughly in order to avoid problems during the event. A good solution would be to send some people to conduct an inspection visit before the attribution.

With the staff presently working at our WUC Dpt., I think that having around 25 championships every two years should be a maximum. And even with 25 competitions, this is still a big amount of work. I am sure that in the near future we will have to hire one our two people in order to become more and more professional in the way we manage those events.

We already have a lot of candidatures for 2012 and 2014 and we are very proud of this. We have to work a lot to build a superb program for the future.

(text and picture: Yvan Dufour)