Switzerland has fired men’s ice hockey head coach \u2060Patrick Fischer after he admitted using a fake COVID-19 vaccination certificate to travel to the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the Swiss Ice Hockey Federation said \u200bon Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Fischer issued a statement on Monday \u200csaying he \u200centered China using a non-valid certificate \u200bthat the Swiss federation did not know about. Swiss public broadcaster SRF said it had previously \u2060confronted Fischer with the allegations.<\/p>\n
The Swiss federation initially gave Fischer \u2060its backing, commending the coach for admitting his mistake, but media pressure brought \u200babout a change of \u2060mind.<\/p>\n
“The case is legally closed but has triggered a public debate about \u2060values and trust, \u200bwhich the federation takes very \u200bseriously,” federation president Urs Kessler said in a \u200bstatement.<\/p>\n
“From \u200ctoday’s perspective, our initial assessment \u2014\u00a0that the matter was concluded \u2014\u00a0was too short-sighted. This is about values and respect, that are fundamental to \u200cSwiss Ice Hockey and which Patrick Fischer did not uphold in 2022.”<\/p>\n
The 50-year-old, who led Switzerland to three World Championship silver medals, said he had \u200bbeen \u200bin an extraordinary personal crisis as he \u200bdid not want to be vaccinated but also \u2060did not want to let down his team at the Games.<\/p>\n
Fischer had been in charge since 2015, and was due to bow out \u200bafter this year’s World Championship, which Switzerland will host in May. Jan Cadieux, already announced as Fischer’s replacement, will now take charge with immediate effect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Switzerland has fired men’s ice hockey head coach \u2060Patrick Fischer after he admitted using a fake COVID-19 vaccination…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[28521,14585,17,28656],"class_list":["post-50078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-switzerland","tag-2022-beijing-olympics","tag-covid-19","tag-switzerland","tag-vaccination"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ch\/116415305406137116","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ch\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}