News from Lausanne

Greetings from Lausanne, Switzerland.

The ICSD Board has been in meetings for the last two days and prior to that, I met with the IOC and Sports Accord.

The meeting with the IOC was an opportunity to follow up on items discussed at our previous meeting. An example is having ICSD representatives on IOC commissions. This is work in progress. We also agreed to work on strengthening our partnership as per our memorandum of understanding agreement. I also shared my concerns about the lack of awareness about deaf sports within Olympic programs around the world. The IOC agreed to work with ICSD to achieve greater inclusion for deaf athletes. 

We had a ‘first’ during our board meeting. We had the heads of ICSD Commissions present on the activities of their commissions. The board were very pleased with the updates that came out of the Reform Commission, Women in Sports Commission, Youth Commission, Legal Commission and the Technical Commission. It was wonderful to see the good work delivered by these commissions and to see our work load being shared across our commissions. On behalf of the board, I want to express my sincere gratitude to members of our commissions for all their hard work at ICSD. 

Now I want to ask the ICSD Vice President for World Sports, Kang Chen to give his perspective of the board meeting that we’ve just had.

Greetings. We’ve just had a tough 2 days of board meetings. It takes time for a team of people to understand the different perspectives that is brought to the table during these meetings but with the good team work and positive approach from all, we got there. We are looking forward to delivering a great Congress during the upcoming Deaflympics in Italy. We all want to be the best we can for ICSD.

I also agree it was wonderful having the Heads of Commissions participate at our board meetings. Through their presentations, the board gained a better understanding of what our members and athletes are looking for from ICSD. We are looking forward to seeing this momentum continue and result in a better and stronger ICSD for all.

We also had Kit McConnell from the IOC come to our board meeting and listen to the presentations from our Heads of Commissions. We were very pleased when Kit said that it was clear that we’ve done some fantastic work in the short time that the current board has been in place, particularly in the reform program of work. Well done to all of you who helped us get there with this work. He also met each board member and we will be posting a group photo that we had with Kit.

I also want to thank the Winter Deaflympic Games Organising Committee for coming from Italy to present on the progress with delivering the games and the board was very pleased with the great work that has been done by the committee. The board also believes that it will be a very successful Winter Deaflympics and I look forward to seeing as many of you in Italy this December.