The contents are as follows:

1. the budget is ten times less than the two preceding world championships;
2. the township of St. Wendel has never organized a F.I.S. rollerski event:
3. the jury has never had the chance to look over the courses or the organization;
4. only two months and three weeks remain before the start of the event;
5. the organization of previous rollerski races in Germany has been poor ( see, for example,

the report on the events in 1997 and 2002 in Geyer / Zwonitz ).

The signatures at the foot of the document are those of George Brouwer ( Senior ), Gianluca Codemo and Gijsbregt Brouwer ( Junior ). The complete text is available in the original English and translated into Italian language.

The groundless reasons cited for the requested postponement ( and subsequent cancellation ) of the world championships raise a smile. Here’s why:

Moreover, the plot thickens when you consider that it is the Brouwers who for over two years have been proposing the candidature of St. Wendel.

What happened in the meantime is not clear, or can only be imagined bearing in mind the signatories of the letter to the F.I.S. subcommittee, who have been careful not to inform anyone as to the situation of their own creating at St. Wendel so as to be able to present their requests at the Miami F.I.S. congress, informing all and sundry when everything had already been decided.

The phrase which continues to baffle us is the following: "our proposal has been made with only two interests in mind: the rollerski atletes and the sport of rollerski in general. We believe that a poor edition of the world championships would damage athletes, the sport of rollerski and the F.I.S., even though we deeply regret the present situation".

Gijsbregt Brouwer has been careful not to ask an opinion from the very people he claimed to safeguard, that is to say the national teams and the athletes themselves; on the other hand it is well known that keeping the subjects in ignorance is the oldest form of social control.

On their part, the "subjects" have lost two years of preparation, a global advertisement on Eurosport, sponsorship, promotion and articles in related magazines throughout Europe.

What can we say in reply to someone who asks us for explanations in the absence of official answers? We reply that unfortunately this is a leap year, there’s no snow, the drought hasn’t allowed us to work the cannons, a strange seismic quake has reduced the radius of the downhill bends rendering the course dangerous…In other words, it was destiny, the same destiny that unfortunately arranged for the "Non German jury" to have nothing better to think about than our splendid sport.

Just recently, to round off the disaster, the acting president of the F.I.S. Rollerski Subcommittee was informed via a news article on our site of the cancellation of the World Cup trial in Poland, an announcement confirmed by Brouwer himself a week later. And so the events in Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland will share the same fate as the 2004 World Championships.

Meanwhile the jury which monopolises every international Rollerski competition ( Gijsbrejt Brouwer and Gianluca Codemo ), and which by the purest coincidence happens to be the very same jury which found itself on a collision course with the St. Wendel organising committee, announces with pride that everything is ready for the first leg of the World Cup in Zagabria: courses tested to perfection and every organisational detail according to regulations, "and not like it would have been at the cancelled world championships!"

But the happenings at Zagabria will be the subject of our second instalment, the chronicle of certain death for international Rollerski.

The Editorial Office of skiroll.it