On the second day of the Sambo World Championships in Serbia an Elective Congress of the European Sambo Federation was held. This meeting was attended by 22 national sambo federations, ESF Members, representatives with 8 Executive Committee members among them.
Sergey Eliseev, President of the European Sambo Federation, made a report report on the work done in the past four years. He analyzed the identified shortcomings outlined the direction of the Federation’s future activities:
“Today the European Sambo Federation includes 36 countries with three country-candidates (Austria, Norway, Sweden). And out of these 36 national federations 21 country received a National Olympic Committee recognition. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to reach our goal of 30 recognized countries.
If we take into consideration the International Sambo Federation’s active steps in becoming part of the Olympic family, this state of affairs is clearly unacceptable. We must put considerable effort in this direction since we must have at the very least 25 recognized countries, according to the Olympic Charter.
Concerning international competitions, Europe has a clear advantage over every other continent. Other continents usually organize international competitions a lot more localized while Europe can regularly change its competitions venues (European Championships and International Tournaments). This helps in successful and active popularization and promotion of our sport on the continent.
According to our calendar plan there were the following competitions were conducted in Europe: European Sambo Championships among Youths and Juniors in Limassol (Cyprus); European Sambo Championship in Gijon (Spain); European Sambo Cup in Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic)”.
The President also noted that the main event for our sport in the past four years were the II European Games in Belarus (Minsk). 140 sambo athletes from 30 countries were able to test their skill on the main sporting event in Europe. This is a considerably higher number of competitors, than in Azerbaijan (Baku) during the I European Games, where we could see only 72 athletes in eight weight categories from 21 countries. Mr. Eliseev expressed gratitude to the Games’ Organizing Committee for a job well done.
In addition, the head of the ESF told the participants of the Congress about projects for the development of sambo in Russia in schools and higher educational institutions. At the moment, the All-Russian projects “Sambo in School” and “Sambo in Universities” have been approved and are being implemented. At the start of 2019, the “Sambo in School” project was implemented in more than 800 educational organizations. In addition, a similar project “SAMBO in every educational institution” is being implemented in Ukraine.
“I recommend all national sambo federations to take this experience as a basis for the development of sambo among children and teenagers. A number of educational organizations from Latvia, Czech Republic, Italy, Cyprus, Armenia and Belarus are already cooperating with us in the implementation of the ‘Sambo in School’ project. Also, in 2018, the first World Sambo Championship among schoolchildren was held in Orel (Russia),” concluded Sergey Eliseev.
Following the results of the Congress, Sergey Eliseev (Russia) was unanimously re-elected to the post of President of the European Sambo Federation for a new four-year term, and Roberto Ferraris (Italy) was elected as General Secretary. Angel Gimenez (Spain) and Patrick Drid (Serbia) became Vice-Presidents.
The previous Elective Congress of the European Sambo Federation (ESF) was held in 2016 in Kazan.