We are pleased to announce that today at the General Assembly the current Executive Vice President Margit Jungmann was voted in as the new Elected President, replacing Stan Perkins at the end of the Malaga Championships.

Before the current championships we met up with Margit to get to know her a little more, below you can read all about our new president.

Who am I?

• Name: Margit Jungmann
• Nationality: German
• Event Competed in: Heptathlon, sprint, High Jump
• When did I start being involved with Masters Athletics:
  I am involved since 12 years when I was elected as President of the German masters

What is your biggest accomplishment within ‘masters-athletics’ so far? And how did/does it make you feel?
The best moments I had where amongst the athletes when I feel that they are happy to compete and to find friends from all over the world. It is the friendship and team spirit that are the highlights for me.

How do you balance life and athletics?

Athletics has always been part of my life since I was a young athlete. Since I am involved in masters’ athletics it has been big challenge for me to balance my life between family, job and athletics. So I am used to handle it. As I have the full support of my family (my husband is engaged as well), my friends and of my boss I can fulfill my duties. I only miss the time for my personal training.

What was the best advice you were ever given?

You must love what you are doing.

Do you have a saying or motto that you live your life by?

To do always a more than I would ask from others

Where can people follow you? (Links to social media etc.):

I am not on social media

Anything else you’d like to share?

It would be a great honor for me to serve WMA as president.

About the Role!

What do you believe will be your biggest challenge as the WMA President? And how would you approach it?

 The biggest challenge is to be the president for all athletes from all continents and to support them with the different needs. I am convinced that the team of the council will help me to fulfil this challenge. Especially the representatives of the regions will have an important role.

 What do you see about the WMA currently that is successful and you would like to keep it going and push further?

With Stan Perkins we started to create more professionalism in our work, f. e. by having a competition management team to run the championships together with LOC and VP Competition. We need to continue this and have more professional support in other parts. For that we need to find partners to be able to finance it. To run an organisation like WMA is getting more and more a fulltime job.

We have to continue to run a clear anti-doping strategy including prevention and information, that means we need to continue and strengthen the work for clean athletics. WMA should develop a movement to support clean athletes with morals and principles. We should try and emphasise this. “I run clean in Europe” or “True Athletes” are good examples.

 What would you like to change or develop in order to improve the WMA either as a sporting organisation of its public image?

We need to develop better communication and marketing strategy. We absolutely need to use our successful championships and our great champions as ambassador for masters athletics. The interest of media is increasing.  We need to have a media and marketing committee to take care of these matters and make suggestions to the council.

 What’s your position on how to increase the global inclusion of athletes from smaller countries, and increase the awareness of the WMA?

The situation is so different in the different parts of the world. There is not one solution for that. The representatives of the regions and the IAAF affiliates must be with WMA to make progress on that. I am glad to have already good contacts to a lot of affiliates.

A little bit extra information about Candidate – Margit Jungmann

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