Austrian delegation at the 30th Summer Universiade in Napoli (Photo courtesy of Unisport Austria).A stellar year for Unisport Austria, Austrian athletes earned a total of 29 medals at university sports events throughout 2019. Though it wasn’t just Austria’s university athletes producing results, but also the driving force behind Austria’s thriving university sport culture led by Acting Unisport Austria President, Dr. Hemma Angerer.
Unisport Austria itself is actually a governmental body, where the national agendas and participation for international university sports are the responsibility of the organisation within the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research. Unisport Austria even contributes to national controlling of universities, with a university sports department continuously developing the nation’s university sports sector—supporting over 376,700 university students.
“In difference to most other university sports associations, we have performance agreements with universities and their university sports departments including a financing obligation,” said Angerer.
In addition to putting the utmost importance on universities, Austria has constitutional and legal requirements ensuring gender balance through a statutory quota (50%) of boards at autonomous universities being represented by women through the National Universities Act—including university sports.
“We have a systemic surveillance and governance system for gender in the performance agreements negotiation process of the universities,” Angerer mentioned.
As 2020 proved difficult for many, Unisport Austria is already using this opportunity to plan ahead and prepare their athletes for the Chengdu 2021 FISU World University Games, as well as the European Universities Games in Belgrade. Preparing athletes for Games-time is already a large task, but Austria took it one step further and decided to bring the competition to them. The bid city Innsbruk was selected to host the 2022 FISU World University Championship Sport Climbing in partnership with the Austrian Climbing Federation. This was an obvious choice, given that the Austrian city already holds a strong sport climbing legacy and culture.
“We will focus the goal to organise excellent competitions and welcome all participants with memorable moments in Austria,” said Dr. Angerer.
With so much support for universities, Unisport Austria not only continues to reach new heights in the development of university sport, but is already showing the world just how committed they are for 2022 and beyond.
Organising Committee for the 2022 FISU World University Championships Sport Climbing formed in January 2020 (photo courtesy of Unisport Austria).