Alpine boss Wolfgang Maier fears manipulation through corona tests at the Olympics in Beijing. “With a PCR test I can immediately take any athletic opponent out of the race. Nobody needs to tell me that this is a pipe dream because you know what it’s all about,” said the top official of the German Ski Association (DSV ) on Saturday in the ARD. The point, Maier said, is to present oneself as a nation, especially as an organizer. Now you have a means in hand against which you have no chance. For example when it says: “Hey, you are positive, then you go out.”
Maier told the SZ on Friday that, in his opinion, “the door to manipulation is currently open”. For months he has been asking the officials to define from which CT value a corona test will be assessed as positive or negative – how sensitive the tests are, very roughly speaking – neither the International Olympic Committee nor the local organizers would clarify this . This exposes athletes to great uncertainty.
“If anyone still believes that you can’t reach into the box here,” said the 61-year-old. Maier also referred to snowboarders and tobogganists who had reported adverse conditions at the test competitions in Beijing. The sports official described the mental cinema that would start. “What it means to have to go to a quarantine room where cockroaches run around. What it means when you are locked up in a foreign country where nobody speaks English or German to you,” said Maier. These are also topics that need to be addressed. “That’s just a fact that I just want to have clarified.” Former ski racer Felix Neureuther as an ARD expert praised Maier: “I like that Wolfi shows a clear edge, that speaks to things.”
Maier also spoke again about the corona test procedures and called for standardization. He also did not ignore the boycott issue and called on politicians not to withdraw sports funding from athletes if the worst comes to the worst. It would be “a political statement” to say that we are not withdrawing funding because the topic is so present and so precarious “that you can understand it when someone says: No, thank you, I don’t want to be there now. “