Latvians selling medals to fund team

Two Olympians in cash-strapped Latvia have decided to take the drastic step of selling their medals to help athletes get to the 2011 International Paralympic Committee (IPC) world championships in New Zealand.

Aigars Apinis, a two-time world Paralympic champion in discus and shot-put, and Juris Tone, an Olympic bronze winner in bobsleigh, are ready to sell their medals to raise the 46,955 euros needed for the January trip, an official said.

“The state cannot provide the money needed so the team can afford to go to New Zealand,” Daiga Dadzite, president of the Latvian Paralympic Committee, told AFP yesterday.

“It’s an act of desperation,” she said, adding that it was unacceptable for the two men to be driven to take such a step.

The IPC Athletics World Championships run from ­January 15 to February 1 in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Apinis won Paralympic bronze in discus and shot-put in Sydney in 2000, gold in discus in Athens in 2004, and the discus gold and shot-put silver in Beijing in 2008. For now, he is only planning to sell his first bronze, the Latvian Paralympic Committee said.

Tone, meanwhile, was a bronze winner in four-man bobsleigh in Calgary in 1988, competing for the Soviet Union. Latvia won independence when the communist bloc crumbled three years later.

Tone told Latvian sports website sportacentrs.com that he was motivated by a desire to support disabled athletes.

“We have to focus our attention how to help them,” he said.

“It is not worth keeping such historic relics at home. Yes, the material worth of that medal will grow with years, but not the moral worth,” he added.

Latvia is locked in a draconian austerity drive which is part of a 2008 bailout with the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Public funding for the Latvian Paralympian Committee has dwindled almost ten-fold since the Baltic nation’s economy turned from boom to the world’s deepest economic recession.

The state contributes about half of the committee’s annual budget in this nation of 2.2 million, with the rest raised through sponsorship, Dadzite said.