The meeting was held at the Novogorsk Training Centre near Moscow.
Minister of Sport Vitaly Mutko announced at the meeting that in part the programme aimed at enhancing Russia’s attractiveness as an organiser of high-level international competitions and increasing the international competitiveness of Russian sports. Twenty major competitions at world championship level will soon be held in Russia, he said. By 2016, all Olympic sports should be provided with federal-level training facilities. In addition, there are plans to increase per capita sports infrastructure capacity by 50% by 2018, while the number of residents practicing sports on a regular basis should grow from 20.6% in 2011 to 40% in 2020.
Russian Federation Minister Mikhail Abyzov suggested discussing the funding scheme for the state programme. He emphasised the scale of the upcoming investment and called for it to be distributed constructively and rationally. “The programme is planned to run up to 2020 and will allocate a total of 1.7 trillion roubles, with 275 billion roubles due to come from the federal budget. Of course, spending on this scale must be monitored and overseen by the public,” he said.
On the whole, the experts taking part in the discussion of the draft programme assessed it positively.
