First there’s rowing, from the women’s two-less to the men’s double four. Then the sport climbing starts and the track cyclists (men and women) step up for the team sprint and the team pursuit. Finally, there is the first final for women in BMX, and the women jump into the water for their triathlon.
It’s a packed schedule to be completed this Friday in Munich, Germany. The European Championships started there on Thursday for the second time in history. The European titles will be distributed here in various sports for the next week and a half. Four questions about this ‘multi-EK’.
1 How many sports are involved?
There are nine sports that have joined the European Championships: athletics, gymnastics, beach volleyball, canoeing, rowing, sport climbing, table tennis, triathlon and cycling. You can say that the latter sport can still be divided into four separate sports, which otherwise would have organized championships separately: BMX, track cycling, mountain biking and road cycling.
Combining top sport should lead to more audience and attention
In total, more than 4,700 athletes from fifty countries will compete and there will be 177 competitions with medals to be won. There are no Russians or Belarusians among them, who are not welcome in Germany because of the war in Ukraine.
The Netherlands will travel to Germany with a delegation of 140 athletes, not counting the rowers, who will participate with twelve boats. Eye-catchers include Femke Bol (400 meter hurdles), Nienke Brinkman (marathon), Fabio Jakobsen (road cycling) and Jeffrey Hoogland (track cycling).
For some of the sports – gymnastics, track cycling and rowing – a World Cup will follow later this year. For reigning Olympic, world and European track cycling champion Harry Lavreysen, that is a reason to partly skip this tournament.
2 Why are all these championships bundled?
The idea of a joint European Championship is based on the concept of the Champions League in football. Swiss football marketer Mark Jörg, who in the past worked for the European football association UEFA, thought together with British sports marketer Paul Bristow that bundling top sport, just like in football, leads to more audiences, more television attention and therefore more income for should lead the sports and their athletes. It should also save costs because all championships are held in one place.
The two men founded the European Championships Management (ECM) and managed to persuade seven European sports associations to join them four years ago. In 2018, the first multi-European Championship was a fact. Well in two cities, because where the organizers chose Glasgow as a location in Scotland, the European Athletics Championships had already been assigned to Berlin in Germany. No problem, they thought at ECM: then we’ll just do it in two places.
ECM wants to organize a joint European Championship every four years in the near future. It is not certain how many sports participate in this; although the sports that entered the first edition all committed to this second tournament, two – swimming and golf – dropped out. And it is already clear that athletics will not be there in four years.
/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data89313908-ab9663.jpg)
Photo Matthias Hangst/Getty Images
3 Didn’t the first multi-European Championship bring what the sports federations expected?
After the previous edition in Glasgow and Berlin, the reactions were mostly positive. Dutch sports associations spoke of more attention from the press, although they also noticed in swimming and athletics that the power of television led to some events being scheduled at unfortunate times. The event was nevertheless “worthy of repetition”, Thorwald Veneberg, general director of the KNWU cycling association, summed up the sentiment.
This year again, there seems to be more attention for the nine affiliated sports. The European umbrella organization for public television broadcasters, the EBU, has announced that public broadcasters in at least 40 European countries will broadcast more than 3,500 hours of live sports on television – 500 hours more than four years ago. The Dutch NOS also broadcasts the European Championship.
The relatively small sports that participate in the European Championships mainly see the advantages of the joint event. “It offers our organizations and athletes an opportunity to get used to major events,” says director Robin Baks of the Dutch Climbing and Mountain Sports Association (NKBV). Sport climbing is part of the European Championship for the first time this year, as is canoeing. “Smaller sports can organize an easily accessible event in the wake of larger sports that gets the attention of both the public and the media,” says Arno van Gerven director of the Watersportverbond.
At the Dutch Triathlon Association they are more critical: “We do not immediately think that we have received more media attention because of Glasgow 2018,” says a spokesperson. Nevertheless, the sport is back in Germany.
The two sports that have dropped out of this European Championship have their own reasons for this: for golf, the tournament could not be fitted into the playing calendar. The European Swimming Federation LEN had another motive: it did not consider the offer from the ECM to participate in the European Championships financially favorable enough. The LEN now organizes its own championship in Rome at the same time as the multi-European Championship in Munich.
Also read: Grab Dutch relay swimmers surprising gold on the first day of the swimming European Championship
4 How does the European Championship compare to the European Games, that other new combined sporting event?
Three years before the first multi-European Championship of 2018, the inaugural edition of the European Games (ES) took place, an event with 20 member sports, nearly 6,000 participating athletes and 253 medal events. Baku 2015 was succeeded by Minsk 2019 and the third edition is planned for 2023 in Krakow.
The European Games are an initiative of the European Olympic Committee (EOC). Like the European Championship, this event has a four-year cycle, and that’s not the only similarity. Six of the sports that can be admired at the European Championship are also affiliated with the ES.
There are indeed differences between the events, emphasizes NOC-NSF chairman Anneke van Zanen. In that role, she is a member of the European Games coordination committee. The main distinction is that the ES aims to be the tournament where European athletes can qualify for the Olympic Games. At the European Championship athletes can become European champions. “Europe was the only continent that didn’t do it this way yet,” says Van Zanen.
But every European sports federation approaches events differently. For many sports, a championship is the main source of income, which is why they prefer to organize a European Championship themselves. There are also sports, such as judo, that hand out their European titles during the ES. And when it comes to canoeing, the ES are not a qualifying tournament for the Olympic Games. That’s the World Cup.
“These are young events that are slowly developing,” says Van Zanen about the unclear division of roles between all sports tournaments. “Every sport is still looking for the best and most beautiful event to participate in.”
According to Van Zanen, sports events do not bite each other, and she is not yet afraid of an excess of tournaments. “It’s like a festival. You used to have a few, now every village has one. And yet they all attract enough people. The same goes for major sporting events. It will be the zeitgeist.”
But the co-existence of the two events is evidence of an administrative competition between European sports federations and the European Olympic Committee. Both hope to develop into the continental sports tournament that European athletes and fans look forward to in the future.