Last week, all the team met with the trainer to talk about some of the season's goals, as always at the start of the season. The most charismatic members of the team expressed their discontent about how the team was being managed, and how our budget spent throughout the season.

The core of the problem is that for years, the University has had an agreement with the Valencian Triathlon Federation to provide a trainer an a project for every season. Roughly half of our ~15.000€ budget went to pay for this, although our trainer (currently one of our own team mates) didn't earn anything near 7000€. Somewhere, for some reason, much of our money was getting "lost" at the federation with no apparent gain for us. We presented an alternative management plan, with total transparency for the budget, everything done by ourselves, etc. which of course implied breaking this tie with the federation, and we called for a new meeting, yesterday, so people to vote to leave things as they were or to go for the new setup. We had started a revolution!

It's obvious the guys at the federation don't want to lose this cool income, so the first thing they did when they knew about our revolution was to phone one of us and warn them that if we went ahead, they would have to take action. What that means, I have no idea, but yesterday it became obvious they didn't just wait for the vote to happen...

So yesterday, at 9PM, we all walked into the meeting room, and let the trainer speak first. Maybe it was a huge coincidence, but he told us that at 6PM, the bosses at the Sports Service had called him and told him that due to a general budget cut from the local government, they had been forced to cut the money for the different sections of the club. This naturally had a big impact on us, as we are one of the most expensive teams in the uni: they have decided to discontinue the triathlon team, and will only support the triathlon activity, which means we can go to train to the University's sport fields and to the swimmingpool, but they won't pay for competitions or anything else, except for the few people that are eligible to attend to the Spanish Universitary Championship (which is a very small percentage, and mostly new people).

The summary is that we've been kicked out, not only the revolution group but also a lot of the new people. Realising we had nothing to do in the new situation, we of course didn't even try to discuss or vote the new plan, and just started discussing what our options are: creating a new club, trying to find some club that might want us in, etc. All of these are going to be a lot more expensive, of course, but oh well... someday this had to finish. If we create a new club, the name will probably be "Komando", which was the codename of the conspiracy group that prepared the revolution. Long live the Komando! :)

And while all of this happened, I've been basically idling, triathlon-wise. All of these conflicts inside the team haven't helped my lack of motivation, so I find myself entering December and not having gone to the swimming pool a single day and just one short cycling training session. The only thing I'm doing is go running with the new people twice a week, because it's fun to know them a bit more. Hopefully if the new team starts I can get started again...