Last week, from Paris, I reported exclusively on the John Helmick case. According to everything that has been researched since then, Helmick's alleged private business as UIPM treasurer could be the result of a system that has dominated the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne (UIPM) for years or even decades.
US citizen John Helmick has been refusing to answer questions for a week and a half now. Helmick has gone into hiding. Of course, the presumption of innocence applies. Helmick does nothing to clear things up in public.
He's not the only one.
Jens Weinreich
Since 1993, president of the UIPM has been the German Klaus Schormann (78), who is unfamiliar with basic good governance rules and runs his organisation in the style of a duodecimo prince. Fittingly, on 16 November 2024, he will hand over his office to his long-time buddy, Joël Bouzou, a Frenchman with close ties to Russia - at the UIPM congress in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Of course, Klaus Schormann and the UIPM have long been tapping into the new sources of money in the sporting wonderland of Saudi Arabia. Most of the Olympic and many of the non-Olympic world federations do the same. They always go straight to where they can cash in easily and find flimsy justifications, lies and excuses as to how this can be reconciled with the much-vaunted Olympic values, human rights, democratic achievements and good governance rules.
The non-transparent practices at the UIPM have been widely reported on in recent years, and not just since the incidents at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. I have been describing the Schormann system since around 1996 and our intensive discussions on the fringes of an IOC EB meeting and ANOC's general assembly in Cancún, when he once again managed to get pentathlon saved as an Olympic sport.
Then IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch had briefly forgotten at the time that Schormann had long since made his son Juanito UIPM vice-president (which he remains to this day) and that it would have been kind of stupid at home in the Samaranch household if the father had ruined the Olympic career of his son of the same name.
Guys, this is not a joke. It happened like this.
Samaranch senior even publicly apologised at a press briefing in Cancún for stating in a newspaper interview that the pentathlon would disappear from the Olympic program.
Since the mid-1990s, Schormann has repeatedly managed to keep pentathlon on the Olympic program and thus keep it alive. There were numerous legendary IOC sessions and meetings after Cancún, for example in 2002 in Mexico, 2005 in Singapore, but also in 2007 in Guatemala, 2008 in Athens ... and many more.
Yes, it was and is a fight for survival. Because without the royalties from the IOC's Olympic TV marketing, the UIPM could not exist.
Jens Weinreich
Hard to believe, what a surprise, there are now even financial reports from the UIPM, although the quality of these will still need to be discussed - stay tuned.
- In 2021, the year of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, there was a large transfer from the IOC from TV marketing (the IOC always pays at the end of the year in which the Summer Games take place): USD 12.1m flowed into the UIPM account - that was 96.44% of all revenue in 2021.
- In 2022, there was an additional payment from the IOC totalling USD 877,526. This is quite normal because the IOC's final calculations and TV business always extend into the post-Olympic year. This additional sum corresponds to 66.03% of UIPM revenue in 2022.
- And in the coronavirus year 2020, the UIPM was one of the Olympic federations that received an advance payment (described as an IOC loan) of USD 1.25m on TV royalties from the IOC. (I'm not sure and still have to do some final research on this, but it could be that the IOC had these loans financed by the Swiss Confederation and didn't even have to make advance payments, or only in part).
In short: the UIPM is one of those international federations that can hardly market its sport because there is no real market for such sports, which are only practised by relatively few people worldwide - apart from the Olympic Games.
This makes it all the more important, of course, that these sports and federations are managed in a modern way by people who know what they are doing (except for decades of wheeling and dealing) and really use all their options (except for going begging in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere).
Without the patronage of HRH Albert II of Monaco, UIPM Honorary President and previously a long-time board member, the UIPM would not have made it to 2024 as an Olympic sport. Financially, it would hardly have been possible either - the UIPM is based in Monaco.
This is another reason why the events surrounding long-time UIPM treasurer John Helmick are so important. Helmick, who of course sits on the UIPM Finance Commission, which is of course chaired by Klaus Schormann, was the point of contact for a number of financial threads.
I would like to document the importance of the case with a list of questions that are not answered by the UIPM:
