Olympia 2018: Minister of the Interior de Maiziere: No German application for the time being

The outgoing Federal Minister of the Interior, Thomas de Maiziere, has spoken out against a timely German bid for the Olympic Games:”I think it’s too early,”said de Maiziere shortly before his departure from Pyeongchang.

He announced the development of a “national strategy for major sporting events”,”not only for the Olympic Games”.

“We must gradually move towards a situation in which there is popular support for such an event. The new federal government will get this off the ground with sport and other players”, the Minister added. In order to do this, we need “from the outset the economy in the boat, the important multipliers”. Then “at some point the topic of Olympia could come back into focus”.

They will never have a chance to convince the taxpayer to apply for a sporting event if the international associations are not credible,”said de Maiziere. What bothers him is that “we in Europe are always complaining that the IOC is giving away the games to certain locations that we don’t like, but that don’t have the strength to advertise ourselves”.

De Maiziere believes that a consistent implementation of the top-class sports reform is urgently needed. If you look around in other countries such as Great Britain, Canada or Norway, you will find that “Germany is no longer playing the role it once played in terms of taxpayers and coaches and athletes and no longer stands where it really belongs”.

The goal of the top-class sports reform is that we “become better by fair means to support the coaches and that the athletes have a reasonable perspective even after their active career” Germany as a whole must “try hard to be better again”.

De Maiziere will no longer be a member of the new federal government and is expected to be replaced by Horst Seehofer as Minister of the Interior. IOC President Thomas Bach gave him advice in Pyeongchang, said de Maiziere:”He said:” If you stop now, you will reject all offers for the first half of the year. I think that this is a good idea:” He leaves office nostalgically, but you can be connected with sport like millions of others,”you don’t have to be a Federal Minister of the Interior for that”.