Switzerland Today

Hello from Bern,

The conditions in which young athletes train and compete are again under the spotlight after research by public broadcaster SRF (see below). This time, it’s synchronised swimming making a splash for the wrong reasons.

Keystone / Urs Flueeler

In the news: Novartis cuts, young offenders, and Covid lurking.

• Basel-based pharma company Novartis plans to cut 1,400 of its 11,600 jobs in Switzerland over the next three years. The cuts are part of a global cost-saving operation that will see some 8,000 positions disappear worldwide.
• Swiss sprinter Alex Wilson was banned for four years on Tuesday after an anti-doping tribunal judged he intentionally used an anabolic steroid. The case goes back to the Tokyo Olympics last July, when the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne reinstated Wilson’s provisional suspension days before he was due to compete in the men’s 100 and 200 metres. Wilson claimed he had eaten contaminated meat.
• The number of juvenile criminal convictions increased by 7.5% to 20,902 in Switzerland last year. Minors committed more crimes than before in practically all areas of the Criminal Code, the Federal Statistical Office said on Tuesday: but whereas convictions for traffic offences rose significantly, the number of convictions for drug offences continued falling sharply.
• A total of 33,108 new coronavirus cases were reported by health authorities on Tuesday in their weekly update – an increase of 34% on last week’s numbers, which were already on the rise after having been dropping steadily since March. Some 14 people died over the past week as a result of the disease, and 300 were admitted to hospitals, where Covid patients currently take up 6% of intensive care beds.

Keystone / Sam Mooy

Synchronised swimming: the latest Swiss sporting scandal?

After the accusations of abuse of young gymnasts in 2020, and cases which later emerged in dance schools in Lausanne and Zurich, it’s now the turn of synchronised swimming. Last night, public broadcaster SRF publishedExternal link research and interviews claiming the sport is “corroded by an atmosphere of fear and nepotism”. SRF says training sessions can include threats, insults, and physical over-taxing (e.g. making a swimmer stretch beyond their capabilities); while on the administrative side, the organisation of the federation is apparently “chaotic” and driven by “favouritism”. As a result, while both co-presidents of the federation denied the charges, they also announced they were stepping down from their roles. In the meantime, an internal investigation into the sport, ordered by the over-arching Swiss Aquatics body, has been ongoing since May this year.

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Opioids: not a crisis, but not to be ignored, say Swiss researchers.

Is Switzerland heading for a US-style opioid epidemic? Not quite, says the federal institute for technology ETH Zurich. According to a two-decade overview published yesterday by scientists, Switzerland is still “a long way” from levels seen elsewhere – but opioid use, and abuse, is rising. Between 2000 and 2019, the number of opioid-related calls made to Tox Info Suisse, the national poisoning hotline, increased by 177%. During the same period, sales of opioids almost doubled, from 14,300 units sold per 100,000 inhabitants to 27,400. The study warned that the increase was bigger for stronger products like oxycodone. The ultra-strong fentanyl, the current driver of the crisis in the US, is the third-most sold opioid in Switzerland. And while it all seems manageable for now, the reserachers say the figures are just the tip of the iceberg; more research is needed to discover true addiction levels and opioid-related deaths.