Student Functional Athletics League To Appear in Russia

Even though the Functional Athletics Federation has been active for a decade, the sport was officially acknowledged in Russia only in 2017. The Federation has used this time to accumulate experience in organizing and judging tournaments, and now the team is ready to engage students.

As explained by Evgenii Raskin, ITMO’s Vice Rector for Youth Policy, with the foundation of the new student league, functional athletics will be actively promoted at universities, engaging more athletes and increasing competition.

“As functional athletics targets overall fitness, athletes from other disciplines, such as weightlifters or rugby and football players, will be able to work out at dedicated sports facilities, which include barbells and dumb-bells, and a great variety of fitness equipment. We aim to introduce such gyms at every university as training grounds for both specialized functional athletes and those competing in other sports in order to increase their general fitness. This way, we want to widen the existing approach to physical well-being in Russia,” says Alexey Barymov, the president of the Functional Athletics Federation. 

Currently, the federation has 40 regional offices, each of which will reach out to universities, introducing the sport and offering to equip a specialized gym at the university or inviting students to practice at an existing facility. Moreover, as official tournaments in the discipline are tentatively scheduled for 2024, a special training program has been compiled to make the newly established student league fit for competitions.

“At ITMO, we actually had a functional athletics student sports club between 2014 and 2017, but then the interest faded and the club was closed. We now offer it as a training option, but there are no regular classes at the moment. With the new student league, we will be able to reintroduce functional athletics at ITMO, especially given that a recent tournament in the discipline showed us that it is still in demand (around 50 participants turned up) but not everyone is ready to compete yet. We are planning to implement regular training sessions, develop a program, and start training for competitions of different levels, from university- to nation-wide,” adds Dmitry Rusanov, head of Student Sports Club KronBars. 

The ninth national forum on topical issues in student sports was held at ITMO on December 1-2 and welcomed over 400 participants, including representatives of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Ministry of Sport, the government of St. Petersburg, university rectors, and heads of student sports clubs and leagues.

The forum’s program also featured workshops on media promotion and management, seminars and lectures on the development of sports initiatives and technologies, foresight sessions and discussions on sports infrastructure at universities, as well as networking opportunities, jogging sessions, and live podcast shows.