The National Rugby Federation of Ukraine joins the efforts of the National Platform in the fight against manipulation in sport

On 6 December, the National Olympic Committee hosted a meeting between members of the Interagency Working Group "National Platform of Sports Integrity" and representatives of the National Rugby Federation of Ukraine.

The Minister of Youth and Sports of Ukraine, Head of the National Platform Matvii Bidnyi, President of the NOC of Ukraine Vadym Guttsait and President of the National Rugby Federation of Ukraine Yevhen Bazhenkov delivered welcoming remarks.

The Minister welcomed participants of the event and paid great attention to the area of sports integrity in the activities of the Ministry.

With the growing popularity of sports betting, we are also seeing an increase in the number of cases of violations of sports integrity. This sets us the task of improving the legislative, institutional and technical mechanisms that help us effectively counter these challenges, including the establishment of systematic cooperation with sports federations to combat manipulation. Together, we can achieve the best results, - the Minister stressed.

Vadym Gutzeit, President of the NOC of Ukraine, stressed the importance of not only combating actual manipulation, but also the need for preventive, proactive actions to prevent young athletes from falling into the trap of "easy money". The NOC President drew attention to the decision of the 41st General Assembly of the NOC of Ukraine, which approved the Rules of the NOC of Ukraine to implement the Code of the Olympic Movement to prevent the manipulation of sports competitions.

The President of the National Rugby Federation of Ukraine, Yevhen Bazhenkov, noted that there have been no cases of match-fixing or other manipulations of competitions in Ukrainian rugby and expressed hope that this trend would continue in the future thanks to the joint actions of the National Platform and the National Federation.

Speaking at the meeting, Oleksiy Perevezentsev, First Vice President of the NOC of Ukraine and Deputy Head of the National Platform, presented tools of the International Olympic Committee developed specifically to combat the manipulation of sports competitions at the international and national levels. He shared with the participants the latest cases of investigations in international match-fixing schemes.

Nataliia Radchuk, Secretary of the National Platform, Head of Department of International Cooperation and European Integration of the Ministry of Youth and Sports, presented the legal framework and main tasks of the Interagency Working Group, the results of the National Platform's work in 2023-2024, in particular, the statistics on the considered  alerts on violations of sports integrity by the IWG, and the formation of a network of integrity officers in national sports federations.