The Olympic qualifying tournament in beach volleyball will receive full funding, procedural issues remain / Article

The final of the Continental Cup will be held in Jurmala from June 13 to 16, which will practically be a tournament where the last tickets to the Paris Olympic Games will be distributed. Both men’s and women’s tournament winners will be able to go to Paris. Until then, it will be determined who will get the right to represent Latvia in the Olympic selection tournament, six domestic duets in three rounds of selection.

Two months before the start of the tournament, instead of the 400,000 euros co-financing applied for, the Ministry of Education and Culture was ready to give only 230,000 euros to the organizers. The coalition parties then agreed to revise the forwarded draft decision and increase the amount of support to 400,000 euros to purchase the license for the qualifying tournament and cover the organizational costs.

Neither the Latvian Volleyball Federation (LVF) nor the media received a comprehensible explanation, which would go beyond official phrases, why only part of the funding required by the state was supposed to be provided for a long time.

The European Volleyball Confederation (CEV) also expressed concern about the organization of the tournament, and this could indicate damage to the reputation of Latvia’s candidacy, claiming to host other tournaments in the future.

LVF does not yet know what the restrictions or instructions will be for the use of state money,

LVF Secretary General Arnis Tunte told Latvian Radio. He thanked the partners who trusted LVF during the preparation stage without guarantees of providing the necessary funding. LVF is preparing to conclude contracts with the largest cooperation partners first, but until then we still need to find out what the state regulations are so that the finances can be spent.

“There are quite a lot of questions and quite a lot of things that need to agree in order for everything to proceed. We can only be grateful to the cooperation partners who trusted and booked many things without financial guarantees,” said Tunte. “The hotels and other things have been discussed. Of course, now we still have to understand what all the procedures for financing will be and how we will be able to spend it all, because this is the first time we have had such an experience.”

Organizers need to book hotels in time, and there are other pressing issues that cannot be postponed. For example, the folding stands are supposed to be delivered from Poland, which is a complicated procedure.

After the delay in allocating money to beach volleyball and the evasive answers about the reasons, there are opinions in sports circles that the Ministry of Education has its favorite and least favorite sports, but there is no confirmation of such assumptions. The fact that Olympic qualification tournaments in three sports will be held in Latvia in the summer is important. In basketball, with the amount of almost 4.8 million euros, it was quite easy to organize the qualification, it was also relatively easy for hockey players, but in beach volleyball it was the most difficult to secure the necessary state funding.

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