Letter from WAKO Europe Acting Presindent Mr. Istvan Kiraly

Let me inform you about the events of the WAKO Europe Board in the past few days. I am sure we have all been waiting for a solution to the fate of the Turkish Senior European Championship.

As you all know, we are currently living in the second wave. Sadly, COVID has made every sports activity impossible that would have allowed us to hold the Senior European Championship.

I, as the Acting President of WAKO Europe have been continuously observing your work and I stayed in touch with many of you. I also received a lot of feedback from many of you about the situation in your countries. I also heard about the sad news that the clubs are closing one by one and it was impossible to hold trainings and other than the appropriate social distancing, hygiene and separate trainings, no other movement was possible.

The extent of the damage COVID caused here, in our Kickboxing community does not need to be explained to any of you. Unfortunately, we must all live with this. When I took office as WAKO Europe Acting President after the death of our dear President, Prof. Mr Borislav Pelevic and the subsequent election of Mr Roy Baker to be WAKO IF president, I honestly never imagined that we would happen to find ourselves in the middle of such a situation.

Naturally, as a coach, challenges and fights have been part of my sports life every day. I have fought many battles as a coach, I know what it means to lose and to win as well.

Sadly, we experienced that no matter how strong we are, no matter how well we can hold on, sport has lost in this battle. We have to live with that. However we must never be saddened by it or accept it.

In this incredibly difficult period, I have made it my goal to use my coaching experience and talents as if in a competition when we are facing a stronger opponent and I try to make everyone understand that if we do everything we can, if our preparedness, willpower and knowledge is in the right place, we may lose this battle, but we will win the final one.

As sportsmen, we will always hold our head up high no matter if we won or lost. Dear my Friends, I wish to encourage you that even though COVID has defeated our sport and prevented us from organizing any tournaments this year, and prevented us from coming together and experiencing the wonderful opportunity to see our children succeed with the knowledge they learnt.

Sadly we lost this battle. However, if we are strong and work together, we will definitely win the last battle because a prepared, knowledgeable athlete can only win.

I know what we are like and I know that no matter how tough this year is, we will always be back on our feet in the coming years.

Your power and the power of your athletes, your coaches, your referees and your officials extends beyond a virus and we can all survive this crisis. In a few years, we will look back and remember this as a deep, instructive and sad event and we will work hard to avoid these possibilities so that it can never affect us deeply again.

I wished to tell you this long prologue, because I promised you a result and to present it to you within a limited timeframe. I requested a written resolution from the WAKO Europe Board in which we made our decisions based on your feedback. Most of the countries are unfortunately unable to travel or prepare or both. The majority of our countries are unable to prepare for a competition this year in any way.

Therefore, let me share the decision of the WAKO Europe Board with you. The first important announcement to make is that with the permission of WAKO Europe, we cancelled the Turkish European Championship this year . With your permission and authorization, I conveyed this towards the WAKO IF Board yesterday and let them know about the decision of WAKO Europe.

I have also done a lot of work so that the organizers do not suffer great damage. As I promised you all, I have been contacting the organizers since the last Board meeting. Salim Kayici, the President of the Turkish Federation and Mike Triantafyllou, President of the Greek Federation and Chairman of the Greek Organizing Committee have both demonstrated incredible sportsmanship.

Both of them admitted that everyone has to do something for the other in this situation. I am happy to inform you that I managed to agree with Mike, President of the Greek Federation to postpone his 2022 Championship to 2024 so that Turkey can have the opportunity to organize the Senior European Championship in 2022.

Both presidents have agreed to this decision and so Salim Kayici will not be left without a tournament. I proposed this to the Board and it was voted approved with majority. Therefore, these two agenda items were right after one another. One was to cancel the Turkish European Championship this year and the other was to hold it in 2022 and hold the 2022 Greek European Championship in 2024.

Naturally, this decision went to the WAKO IF Board yesterday. I made my suggestion on the WAKO IF Board meeting and the final decision was the same by the WAKO IF Board.

I ask for your support, your understanding and your assistance. It is great pleasure for me to work with all of you and that so many presidents, coaches, athletes assure me of their support in these difficult times. I still ask you to aid my work with any suggestions or ideas you may have. This is a difficult task for me and I will try to do my best as a person, as a coach and as a leader so that we can make the best out of this situation and to do the best for our sport and our WAKO Family!!

Yours sincerely,

Istvan Kiraly

Acting President – WAKO Europe

Vice President – WAKO