There is no long-term sports policy in Azerbaijan

Baku/28.07.21/Turan: The athletes representing Azerbaijan at the Olympic Games in Tokyo have achieved no results as yet. Even worse, nearly half of 44 athletes representing Azerbaijan are mercenaries. Economist Natig Jafarli shared his views on issues of the Azerbaijani sports in the program "Difficult Question" of Kamran Mahmudov.

According to him, there have always been mercenaries in the Azerbaijani Olympic teams, however, this time there are too many of them, nearly - 18 sportsmen.

This is explained as being due to the fact that for many years an emphasis on the development of children's sports in Azerbaijan has been much lower than in developed countries.

Jafarli believes that our country has "focused on result-oriented competitions." This is due to the fact that heads of all sports federations are state officials. In other words, each minister is responsible for some sporting federation. Some ministers are heads of several sporting federations at once. In these federations, in order to demonstrate the development of the country, They spent a part of money earned by illegal, corrupt means to demonstrate progress. Since their task was to report on success, they could not make long-term investments and wait for the result. They needed immediate results here and now. With that end in view, they preferred to invite promising athletes from abroad, nationalize them and send them to competitions. Funds from the state budget were spent mainly on the creation and development of sporting infrastructure, the construction of Olympic complexes and other sporting facilities in the regions.

To economist's thinking, in the last 5-6 years, the oligarch-official-sport system has begun to fail. Many oligarchs and officials lost their posts and, hence, resources. Accordingly, investments in sports were limited. As a consequence, the attention to local athletes has lowered even more over the past 4-5 years. And then the heads of the federations set themselves the task of recruiting athletes from abroad, naturalizing them and sending them to Tokyo.

The expert pointed out that a main part of sporting facilities operate on a paid basis, and therefore are not available for most children. There are also objects that do not function as intended or are completely empty. As for the maintenance of athletes, holding events, representation expenses, etc., the funds for this came from pockets of the heads of federations. However, no sufficient funds were allocated for maintenance and development of sporting schools that form the basis of high sports achievements.

"Therefore, as soon as the funds reduced, the results deteriorated as well. So, there is nothing surprising in the weak performance of our athletes at the Olympics, " Jafarli concluded.—0—