SEGAS: Split in the Sakorafa team, Nikolaou the only candidate?

This year will be an election year in sports, since in the fall we are expected to have elections in all sports federations for the selection of new presidents and new councils.

In fact, already in three of the largest and most important federations (SEGAS, KOE, EOPE) we have the respective candidate presidents, Yiannis Nikolaou for SEGAS, Kyriakos Giannopoulos for KOE and Giorgos Karabetsos for EOPE.

Giannopoulos and Karabetsos are already presidents and have a significant lead, so as you can see all the interest and the spotlight is on SEGAS, the largest and oldest federation, where we have a new candidacy, of Yannis Nikolaos, a sports personality with many years of service in the world athletics federation, who is also the president of the Ermis Istanbul sports club and, in addition to his international reach, experience and know-how, he also knows very well the internal issues of Greek athletics.

Yiannis Nikolaou is currently the only candidate for the presidency of SEGAS and as it appears after the latest developments due to the split that came from Sofia Sakorafa’s group, it is possible that he will also remain the only one. After all, it is not easy to have a rival awe in a candidacy with the acceptance and dynamics presented in the field of athletics by the face of Mr. Nikolaos.

Giannis Nikolaou is considered as one of the experts in the field of athletics, a man with a vision, a plan, who is unifying and supra-party, without exclusions, limitations and commitments. He declares that he is determined to lead Greek athletics into a new era, ready to respond effectively to any kind of challenge, having a vast experience of more than 35 years in the field of sports, communication, administration and international crisis management.

On the other hand, the divisive tendencies that led to the schism within the Sakorafa group are a new development that creates a big problem for the current president of SEGAS, and that is why she has obviously not decided whether she will stand as a candidate for president in the upcoming elections to claim the re-election to the leadership of SEGAS.

After all, in 2021, in addition to its marginal election with a margin of four unions, it was the Sevasti-Panagopoulos group that led its pre-election campaign and which group is the one that has recently been targeted several times by the president of SEGAS, culminating in the last general assembly, where the schism in the Sakorafa group from the Sevasti-Panagopoulos group was shown in the most official way.

All these developments combined with the refreshing, hopeful, sporting and also social profile of Yiannis Nikolaos, are issues to which the current president of the federation does not seem to have answers and the rallying effort he is making during this time to make a reckoning of forces of it, does not show encouraging results at all, as the internal front it has to deal with is not negligible dynamic.