Discuss revised England teams for 2010 Olympiad

[Matthew Turner]

Carl Hibbard wrote,

"Matthew Turner wrote:
"There is something wrong with your quote of £45,000. I haver not looked at it."

I don't actually believe this to be the figure, however I do agree that the ECF needs to be more transparent in what things are costing so we can at least judge when say the CoM will break even (if it can...) regardless of the comments of profit etc."

More or less? I'll vote for more

[John Upham]

Struth, who is actually approving these amounts on web development for Level 2 & 3 then?

I am not aware of any amounts being spent on web development since my contract expired in March 2010.

I continue to be available pro bono for Technical Support although there are developments I would like to make.

I am also aware of the sales of CoM product when it is purchased via PayPal. Sales via other means should be entered by hand into the CoM database but since June 2010 I cannot be sure that those sales are accounted for by this means.

The code was written to allow for any number of levels from day one. All that is needed to increase the number of levels is more Q&A content.

Let us not forget that those who have worked at the coal face with CoM do not agree with some of these spend figures. Andrew and I have performed the sums more than once and £45K is totally OTT.

Some persons have already acknowledged that including the salary of the CfS administrator is not appropriate.

Hopefully, the correct figures will be available for the 2010 AGM.

[Matthew Turner]

Some people will be confused as to why this discussion the CoM is occuring on a thread about the Olympiad - let me try to explain. This thread started with Alex H saying

"Wow!

Well done to Malcolm Pein"

Alex was congratulating Malcolm on stumping up funds to get Mickey Adams to play in the 2010 Olympiad.

The previous Olympiad team had been sponsored by LV. However, this was de facto a personal sponsorship from one of their non-executive Directors, Dr. Ian Reynolds. Ian wished to see England represented by their best possible team. How do I know this? Well, I was at the Dinner in Tromso where the subject was first discussed.
Two years down the line, LV are no longer sponsoring the England Team, but are instead supporting the CoM. How did this happen? Stewart Reuben was the International Director at the time of LV's sponsorship of the Olympiad Team and is now in charge of the CoM. I think Lawrence Cooper is entitled to know why Dr. Reynolds has changed his sponsorship priorities. He must finding it particularly gauling when he is having to personally fund some of the expenditure on the Olympiad, while his predecessor is a beneficairy (albeit, presumably a very small one) of the expenditure on the CoM which is now supported by LV.

[Adam Raoof]

Some people will be confused as to why this discussion the CoM is occuring on a thread about the Olympiad - let me try to explain. This thread started with Alex H saying

"Wow!

Well done to Malcolm Pein"

Alex was congratulating Malcolm on stumping up funds to get Mickey Adams to play in the 2010 Olympiad.

The previous Olympiad team had been sponsored by LV. However, this was de facto a personal sponsorship from one of their non-executive Directors, Dr. Ian Reynolds. Ian wished to see England represented by their best possible team. How do I know this? Well, I was at the Dinner in Tromso where the subject was first discussed.
Two years down the line, LV are no longer sponsoring the England Team, but are instead supporting the CoM. How did this happen? Stewart Reuben was the International Director at the time of LV's sponsorship of the Olympiad Team and is now in charge of the CoM. I think Lawrence Cooper is entitled to know why Dr. Reynolds has changed his sponsorship priorities. He must finding it particularly gauling when he is having to personally fund some of the expenditure on the Olympiad, while his predecessor is a beneficairy (albeit, presumably a very small one) of the expenditure on the CoM which is now supported by LV.

I can't really speak with authority on this, but I am fairly sure that the sponsorship switch away from the Olympiad team to CoM predates Stewart being asked to take responsibility for the CoM, at the Board's request.

[John Upham]

I can't really speak with authority on this, but I am fairly sure that the sponsorship switch away from the Olympiad team to CoM predates Stewart being asked to take responsibility for the CoM, at the Board's request.

At the time that the contents of the CoM package were being agreed. CEM was responsible for CoM at board level and Andrew made most / all of the detail decisions. I believe that the decision to include SRs book in the package was made quite early in the life of CoM.

It was only late in the day that the board requested that SR take over the reins for CoM. This is my recollection of events.

[John Philpott]

Matthew Turner wrote

The previous Olympiad team had been sponsored by LV. However, this was de facto a personal sponsorship from one of their non-executive Directors, Dr. Ian Reynolds. Ian wished to see England represented by their best possible team. How do I know this? Well, I was at the Dinner in Tromso where the subject was first discussed.
Two years down the line, LV are no longer sponsoring the England Team, but are instead supporting the CoM. How did this happen? Stewart Reuben was the International Director at the time of LV's sponsorship of the Olympiad Team and is now in charge of the CoM. I think Lawrence Cooper is entitled to know why Dr. Reynolds has changed his sponsorship priorities. He must finding it particularly gauling when he is having to personally fund some of the expenditure on the Olympiad, while his predecessor is a beneficairy (albeit, presumably a very small one) of the expenditure on the CoM which is now supported by LV.

I thought that this post was was totally out of order. The correct attitude towards anybody who procures sponsorship should surely be gratitude rather than adverse comment and insinuation because that sponsorship is not repeated in a subsequent year. I will send you and Lawrence a PM with some specific points.

[Matthew Turner]

John,
I think you must have misinterpretted my posting. I am very grateful to Ian Reynolds for providing sponsorship to the ECF, both for the Olympiad team and the CoM. However, I think the sponsorship has been seriously mishandled by the ECF and the name of one particular ECF official seems to loom large.

[John Upham]

the name of one particular ECF official seems to loom large.

Matthew,
Could you be more specific with your comments and both explicitly name the official and the issues you have with their "handling"?

Since a bunch (is that the correct collective noun?) of Officials have been involved I think it would only be fair to eliminate those that your comments are NOT aimed at.

It would be a tremendous shame if the ECFs relationship with this sponsor was damaged by these postings. This does not help the causes of this forum IMHO and simply provides DW with more anti-forum ammunition.

[Richard Bates]

Far from any evidence of "mishandling" or names "looming large" there just seems to be lots of insinuation and innuendo which seems to be bordering on some sort of (personal?) vendetta.

Maybe there are a whole load of salient facts which have not been presented, but since they haven't i'm not sure quite what is the purpose of this whole discussion.

[Matthew Turner]

I have sent a personal message to Richard, but I would urge people to read back through this thread and actually think about what is being said. This is from page eight

Stewart Reuben wrote
"In fact the COM funds had already been spent or allocated when LV= came along. Thus the total amount went into defraying the expenses of the ECF. Similarly the money I raised in 2008 for the Olympiad teams went substantially to previously agreed expenditure. Both these sums were thus directly beneficial to the ECF. Since we have our very best available playing teams for the 2010 Olympiad things have worked out very well."

If you read Stewart's later comments, he didn't 'raise' any money for the Olympiad in 2008. Ian Reynolds came to him.
The second tranche of LV's sponsorship went into 'defraying the cost of the ECF'. This does not sound like the sort of thing that a sponsor would really want to do. Surely, we could have directed LV's support, so that it could generate more publicity and bring about a more beneficial relationship for both parties. Had this happened I think LV would still be sponsoring the Olympiad team today (but this is just my opinion).

[Jonathan Rogers]

Soooooo, everyone, back to the 2010 olympiad. Are visas, flights etc all shaping up now? I saw this on the FIDE site

http://www.fide.com/component/content/a ... mpiad.html

...and couldn't help worrying about what remains of Loz's hair (cf. general chat section)

[Jon D'Souza-Eva]

I know one player who is supposed to be going, and her invitation letter was such bad quality that she couldn't get a visa with it.

[LozCooper]

Soooooo, everyone, back to the 2010 olympiad. Are visas, flights etc all shaping up now? I saw this on the FIDE site

http://www.fide.com/component/content/a ... mpiad.html

...and couldn't help worrying about what remains of Loz's hair (cf. general chat section)

Hi Jonathan,

The majority of visa applications have been processed and by tomorrow night I expect to have 8 out of the 10 players with visas. I am a bit alarmed to discover that this week the times of one of the Munich charters has changed for the fifth time which has left a lot of teams with connecting flights that don't connect. I'm just hoping that the same thing doesn't happen with Prague which is where we fly to.
I daresay we won't know until we get there how built the hotel is and if the dining room and kitchen are as inadequate as we're being led to believe.

[Richard Bates]

Soooooo, everyone, back to the 2010 olympiad. Are visas, flights etc all shaping up now? I saw this on the FIDE site

http://www.fide.com/component/content/a ... mpiad.html

...and couldn't help worrying about what remains of Loz's hair (cf. general chat section)

Hi Jonathan,

The majority of visa applications have been processed and by tomorrow night I expect to have 8 out of the 10 players with visas. I am a bit alarmed to discover that this week the times of one of the Munich charters has changed for the fifth time which has left a lot of teams with connecting flights that don't connect. I'm just hoping that the same thing doesn't happen with Prague which is where we fly to.
I daresay we won't know until we get there how built the hotel is and if the dining room and kitchen are as inadequate as we're being led to believe.

Tins of Baked Beans. 'Twas always good enough for England cricket teams touring the subcontinent!

[LozCooper]

Tins of Baked Beans. 'Twas always good enough for England cricket teams touring the subcontinent!

Shame we are only allowed 20kg of luggage