UIPM President and Secretary General savour 2020 Olympic year in joint address 

Dr Klaus Schormann, President of the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne, has issued a joint address with Secretary General Shiny Fang to mark the beginning of the 2020 Olympic season.

Their statement reads as follows: 

 

Dear colleagues and friends of the UIPM movement,

We write to share with you some reflections at the beginning of this momentous year.

The Olympic Games in Tokyo will be a special highlight, of course. This will be the 26th time our flagship sport of Modern Pentathlon has featured as a core sport on the programme of the world’s greatest sporting event. We must grasp the opportunity to showcase Pentathlon at a moment when the whole world is watching.

At the same time, it is essential to continue to focus on the work that is happening in UIPM Sports at grassroots level in towns and cities in every corner of the world. Without our development programme there would be no UIPM Sports Pyramid and no future for the UIPM movement. We must always remain strong in all areas!

 

Olympic Games

Tokyo 2020 will be a spectacular moment for Modern Pentathlon. For the first time at the Olympic Games, all five disciplines of our sport will take place in one stadium, thanks to the dedicated Pentathlon Arena that is being created within the Tokyo Stadium (50,000 capacity).

The Games will be a watershed moment for the Olympic movement, as the IOC and all International Federations prepare to enter a new era post-Olympic Agenda 2020, which has promoted the importance of gender equality, inclusion and accessibility, sustainability and many other important facets which are now embedded into our sport at all levels.

We are determined that Tokyo will stage the best-ever presentation of Modern Pentathlon and we need your help to promote our sport in your countries like never before, encouraging new audiences to see how our historic sport has evolved into a truly compelling spectacle.

That said, there is always room for improvement and we will also spend a lot of time in 2020 discussing the future presentation of our sport, particularly for the Olympic Games Paris 2024. The New Pentathlon Working Group will present proposals to the UIPM Executive Board in Lausanne later in January, and we will look forward to sharing the outcome of their discussions with you.

In November you will all have the chance to vote on the EB’s recommendations for a stable future for Modern Pentathlon during Congress in Xiamen (CHN).

 

Youth Olympic Games

The first Olympic Games in Africa is now only two years away, and UIPM will again follow the IOC’s suggestion to use the Youth Olympic Games as an “incubator for innovation” in Dakar (SEN) in 2022.

The New Tetrathlon Working Group is in the process of finalizing the new format that was approved by the EB in Budapest in 2019. Tetrathlon will be more dynamic, with a more continuous flow, as a result of the changes – as anybody who watched one of the test events in 2019 will testify!

At the end of last year we celebrated some wonderful news from the IOC relating to Dakar 2022 – there will be 32 male and 32 female athletes taking part, an increase of 33 per cent on Buenos Aires 2018. This is a testament to the energy and enthusiasm you have all put into the Youth Olympic Games by sending the best Under 19 athletes from your countries to the YOG, not only in 2018 but previously in Nanjing (2014) and Singapore (2010).

 

UIPM Sports Pyramid

Our UIPM Sports Pyramid is stronger with ever with robust foundations supporting Modern Pentathlon at the top.

 

More and more people around the world now have a pathway to Pentathlon thanks to the accessibility of our development sports and the appeal of urban, beach and university formats. We are attracting new audiences to our sport and especially younger generations, with more ways to follow our athletes on television and digital channels.

The Biathle-Triathle National Tour will expand in 2020, with 10 events planned, and the Global Laser Run City Tour will again give us a means of cultivating the seeds of Laser Run, which have been spread in all continents since 2015, worldwide.

Laser Run will again stand proudly alongside our flagship sport during the UIPM 2020 Pentathlon and Laser Run World Championships in Xiamen (CHN), demonstrating the inclusiveness and unity of our movement. And we are looking forward to another wonderful UIPM Biathle/Triathle World Championships in Weiden, the latest in a series of global competitions hosted by Germany.

These sports are a vital pillar of our development programme, giving participants from all different communities and socio-economic backgrounds an entry point into the Pentathlon movement. We continued to rapidly grow our National Federation membership in 2019 and many new members organised their first competitions, not to forget the many courses run in all continents by our UIPM Coaching and Judging Certification Programmes (CCP / JCP).

Our global community is rapidly growing, and we are planning to reach 150 member nations by the time of UIPM 2020 Congress, which will be the biggest democratic exercise in the history of UIPM with all nations’ attendance supported.

All developing countries are benefiting in different ways from the UIPM Sports Pyramid, using the opportunities provided by UIPM’s development programme to chart their own pathway.

To illustrate this we would like to share with you part of a letter written by Mr Nishanthe Piyasena, President of the Sri Lanka Modern Pentathlon Federation, in September 2019.

I am pleased to inform you that we have completed successfully the BTNT19 in Piliyandala Colombo last weekend. It was highly commended by the Ministry of Sports and National Olympic Committee of Sri Lanka and all other stakeholders.

A large number of school kids from schools and clubs all around the country and villages took part in the event. The interest among parents and the general public for the event was evident with the participation in large numbers to witness it.

Since we started our sport in 2014, our athletes were able to get three Biathle and Triathle medals in 2016 (Goa) and seven medals in 2019 (Kazakhstan) and part of the first ten rankings at LR WCH in Dublin last year.

We are now entering to Tetrathlon. Last month we have already started Fencing training with the help of Fencing federation in Sri Lanka for our Senior and Junior categories, specially focusing on young athletes who was born in 2004/5 to prepare next YOG 2022.

 

Conclusion

At UIPM we are committed to our mission of global expansion and confident in our ability to compete with other International Federations and new sports. We will embrace trends and welcome young generations to join in at all levels of our multi-sport movement, creating a global community we can all be proud to belong to.

More than ever in 2020 we are counting on your support and collaboration as we work together to grow our sport, protect the legacy of Baron Pierre de Coubertin and promote our sport as a vehicle for education, peace, democracy, tolerance and humanity.

With our best personal regards,

Dr Klaus Schormann, President 

Mrs Shiny Fang, Secretary General