INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC ACADEMY 7th JOINT - IOA

commercial sector thereby requires professional management skills
and a substantial understanding of marketing, media management
and sponsoring processes that extends the required know-how
spectrum among the managers of elite sport systems (Amis et al.
1997, Copeland 1996, Meyer 2001).
3. Simple Administration, Effective Communication, Quality
Management
To realize the aforementioned tasks and aims, the strategic
governance must be founded on a general organisational structure,
representing an encompassing and at the same time simplistic,
effective and efficient administration. This must link all the
elements of an elite sport system described in this chapter in order to
set the plans elaborated by the strategic management into action in the
respective operative units (Baumann 2003, Deloitte & Touche 2003,
Digel 2003).
In order to secure a fast and convenient way to communicate the
strategies and aims within such a structure (Digel 2003) as well as to
enable bottom-up feedback or quick adaptation of set aims, an
effective internal communication network for the exchange of
information between athletes, coaches, managers and sport scientists,
should be included in such an organisational structure (Green and
Oakley 2001).
4. Mass Sport Foundation, Talent Scouting, Education / Lifestyle
Support
As outlined in Chapter 2.1, approaching a national sport system
holistically and having established a systematic (youth) participation
programme as a grass root for an elites sport system to founded on
(Baumann 2003, Bloomfield 2003, Digel and Burk 2001c) is also a
necessary condition for international sporting success.
In coordination with the management of such a sport participation
system, a sophisticated talent scouting system has to be established,
capable of identifying sporting talents in an early (enough) phase of
the athletes’ development. Such promising athletes are then to be fed
into the actual (high) performance training system (Deloitte & Touche
2003a, Digel 2001b and 2002b and 2003, Embrich and Pitsch 2002,
Green and Oakley 2001, Merkel 1995).
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