EU Athletes took part in the 2019, EU Sport Forum on 8-9th of April in Bucharest, Romania. The EU Sport Forum provided the platform for structured dialogue between the European Commission and various sport stakeholders from across Europe. The Forum’s main objective was to take stoke of progress achieved in implementing the EU agenda for sport and to seek stakeholder’s views on current and planned/possible future activities.
The Forum supplied interesting panel discussions with various stakeholders from across the sporting community who offered their expertise on current topics surrounding sport in Europe. There were particularly interesting topics for EU Athletes and its members on doping in sport, the rights of athletes, the role of federations in promotion of European sport, and justice in sport amongst various other topics.
For the first time at the EU Sport Forum the topic of athletes’ rights was granted a panel session, ‘Are the rights and interests of athletes sufficiently taken into account by sport governing bodies?’. This Panel, which EU Athletes own Paulina Tomczyk had the opportunity to be a part of, along with other player associations FIFPro Europe (represented by Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, Secretary General) and the NHLPA (represented by Sandra Monteiro, Chief of Global Business Strategies) provided interesting dialogue and discussion into the rights and protection of athletes. Some of the topics discussed during this session covered the labour rights of athletes, social dialogue and athlete representation as a whole.
