The current Sports Law allows, among its eccentricities, that with the existence of five (5) sports discipline clubs, which may be geographically at opposite poles of the country, the Ecuadorian Sports Federation may be established. Among them, it classifies clubs with a training memorandum and other clubs with high performance. The former get 30% of the votes, in case of elections for the appointment of the management, and the others – of which there must be at least two (2) – 70% of the votes. For the skilled hunter, here we find the first trap.

The second is more deadly: if, according to the current provisions of the same law, only one (1) training club and one (1) top club are nominated in the second call for elections, the election will still be given in the previously mentioned percentage. mention. Thanks to this law made in bad faith, the national sports federation, the tired one, can be established with only two (2) clubs. According to common sense and the reputation of the first world, the backbone of sports is made up of private sports clubs. In the last law, which had enormous logic, if there were less than three (3) clubs in the province, a sports commission was formed, and if there were more than five (5), a federation. And in both cases, his board started arguing with the boards of other provinces over the board of directors of the national sports federation. Although the system was not perfect, he had the necessary reasoning to understand that a strong and solid federation, which is not only used as a personal substitute during elections (some have two, 2 votes), can only exist if the sport expands and develops in more provinces with more teams, more clubs and hundreds of athletes. The new law embodied that principle, although its promoters swear it was meant to make the sport more inclusive. The practice is pathetic: a “club” that can rightly play rugby or handball that is in Ibarra, in which league would it compete if there are four (4) clubs in Chone, Pindal, Milagro and Pasay? Well, not at all: its players would constantly play with each other, which, even for the least knowledgeable in this matter, has no logic whatsoever. Because collective and individual sports, at their different levels, are fed by categories.

Where there are no categories of training, recreation, performance and high performance, so 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and even 6th, which is, for example, neighborhood sports, there are not enough athletes to choose from or high level qualities. Nor is there a sufficient level of competition, since promotion in the category, when it exists, is one of the most important incentives for athletes. You choose from what is there, and surprises appear. As the Ecuadorian Field Hockey Federation, which has not seen the club team train, nor is there a competition calendar. But he receives money from the state and the Ministry of Sports does not intervene.

The absence of sports leagues with different categories in some provinces like Guayas is a real disaster. Digging through the papers and observing in practice, many clubs are constructions of folders cluttered with papers in which there are too many leaders and a lack of athletes. Whoever invented the differentiation of training and high performance clubs knew what they were doing: relegating training teams to a secondary role and by classifying only one (1) athlete per high performance club as “elite”, taking the entire vote to become entrenched in the federation. They just need to constitute the “Yoyo Federation of Ecuador” and that, of course, with top clubs at the head.

It is a real fact that most clubs do not even have their own carpet, and they depend on public infrastructure for their training. Since the law has privatized sports federations in the provinces, giving them public sports areas in cities for the sole purpose of training athletes, they are also given absolute discretion regarding access to these areas by athletes from any club or sport. . In other words, it distorted the natural right of people to play sports in public places, giving unusual power to provincial federations. You pay or you don’t enter is the new philosophy. This distortion must be eliminated in the reforms of the Law on Sports, the draft of which circulated in the previous assembly contained the same shortcomings of the current law: either they do not understand how sport is structured or they do not want to understand it.

The strength of sports is, it has been repeated a thousand times, in the clubs. We must push for the creation of leagues of different categories in each province and canton. They should be encouraged and not take teams from the same associations that compete preferentially with their own funds that are for training and that do not reach the other participants. When the sports infrastructure passes into the hands of the municipalities through another reform, we will see who will show true love and unconditional interest in educational sports. (OR)