Who's on the new guy?

Over the weekend, the St. Petersburg Sailing Union Conference was held in St . Petersburg, marking a quiet revolution and «opposition victory». What is it about?

SPPS life in the last couple of years has come to a deep deadlock from which no meaningful way out could be seen. The management - as we have already written about - has been in squabbles, squabbles and has completely lost both the reins of management and the trust of yachtsmen, many of whom have sincerely ceased to understand why they pay dues. A public union of yachtsmen in one form or another is a necessary thing. Under the current law any interaction (!) between the authorities and sportsmen may take place only through a public organization created by the latter. That's what national federations of sports exist for, as the highest level of such interaction. The people of St. Petersburg need their own union because St. Petersburg is a separate subject of the Federation, and the SPPS is essentially the analogue of regional sailing federations.
Thus the last conference was an attempt to overcome this deadlock. Among the contenders for the highest office - president of SPPS were two men: Vladimir Loginov, director of Altair company and vice-president of the Union, who was at the helm of it for many years, and Sergey Alexeev, vice-president of ExpoForum (LenExpo in common parlance). Here in this confrontation two approaches collided: «old horse won't spoil a furrow» (this is about V.Loginov) and «we need fresh blood» (about S.Alekseyev).
Initially it seemed that the advantage is on the side of Vladimir Loginov. Firstly, practically everybody knew him and knew what could be expected from him. Besides, position of Loginov was strengthened by «faction of the Central Yacht Club», which traditionally did not accept Vladimir Ilyich. Since this faction also actively opposes many other factions of the Union, its demarche, according to the well-known laws of sociology, caused an answering rally of participants in support of Loginov.
«However, the number and influence of» centrists was insufficient to completely tilt the audience in favor of Vladimir Ilyich. And his main weakness was the fact that in the summary of his activities as president and vice-president of the SPPS, which he presented, he could not point out any serious achievements in recent years. In other words, the question: «What have you done as vice president of the Union over the past five years? » hung in the air.
Perhaps this was the decisive argument in favor of Sergey Alekseev, whose well-thought-out and structured program, taking the SPSU to a new level of interaction both with the yachtsmen and the city authorities, was clearly sympathetic to the audience. It is also possible that people were simply tired of the old names, talk and inaction.

In any case, but the outcome of the conference is very interesting: in addition to the fact that an entirely new person has been elected president of the SPSU, almost all the former figures were removed from the presidium of the SPSU, and its composition was completely renewed.
The opposition has come to power and the revolution has taken place. What will come out of this, we hope to find out soon.