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SÖLDEN, Austria (AP) — The Worldwide Ski Federation is popping to Bernie Ecclestone for recommendation, hoping the previous Method 1 boss can do to Alpine snowboarding what he did to automotive racing up to now.
FIS President Johan Eliasch stated Friday he has approached Ecclestone to turn into a part of a brand new advisory board, meant to assist snowboarding’s governing physique form the way forward for the game.
“Bernie did extremely nicely with Method 1, took that from a sport that was not so acknowledged to a worldwide tremendous sport. I all the time worth his enter. The concept is that he can be on a future advisory board of FIS,” stated Eliasch, who was talking on the eve of the season-opening World Cup races within the Austrian Alps this weekend.
Ecclestone, who turns 91 subsequent Thursday, gained a advertising and marketing grip on F1 within the late Seventies by promoting its TV rights. 4 many years later, the British enterprise magnate had full business management over the game when he stepped down in 2017.
Eliasch is hoping that Ecclestone’s expertise may also help Alpine snowboarding to enhance its world advertising and marketing.
“It’s not the query of if, it’s the query of when, as a result of I don’t assume there may be some other worldwide federation which has not centralized its rights administration or is within the strategy of doing so,” Eliasch stated.
The problem with the decentralized rights administration grew to become apparent this week, as ski followers in america had been uncertain for a very long time if they’d be capable of see this weekend’s races, which incorporates American racers like Mikaela Shiffrin, Nina O’Brien, and Paula Moltzan in Saturday’s ladies’s big slalom, and Ryan Cochran-Siegle and River Radamus in Sunday’s males’s GS.
It solely grew to become clear on Friday that the races can be proven within the U.S. on a web-based streaming service.
“I’m very, very involved about that. That was one in every of my commitments, to centralize the rights administration,” Eliasch stated. “It is a superb instance for why it’s so essential that we’re in management. It shouldn’t be even a risk that races can’t be seen, particularly in such a big marketplace for us because the U.S.”
Ecclestone wouldn’t be the one FIS adviser at a complicated age, as 80-year-old Peter Schröcksnadel, the previous president of the Austrian ski federation, is chairman of the Alpine Future Imaginative and prescient Working Group, which was put in after Eliasch’s election final June.
“He’s very energetic and has many superb concepts,” Eliasch stated. “It’s a bit early to deliberate on what we’re going to do sooner or later. We’re evaluating many potentialities, together with the rise of evening races and totally different calendars to make races much less journey intensive. Additionally, the codecs, to make them extra enticing. And to get races to extra locations.”
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Extra AP snowboarding: https://apnews.com/hub/snowboarding and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports
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Eric Willemsen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/eWilmedia
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