Politique Internationale — As an experienced observer of the Olympic world, what is your view of the current president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, who took over this venerable institution in 2013?
Alan Abrahamson — Thomas Bach is the one who dragged the International Olympic Committee and with it the Olympic movement worldwide into the 21st century. He has been much criticised but no one can contest his record. He is without doubt the IOC president who, since the beginning of the modern Olympics, has been behind the most changes ever in the organisation of the system. With Pierre de Coubertin and Antonio Samaranch, he is the most consequential president in the history of the IOC. Finally, Bach is the most accessible and competent president that the IOC has ever had. He is said to be cold and detached. Nothing could be further from the truth; he has shown real and great human qualities on many occasions.
P. I. — Before taking on his current responsibilities, Thomas Bach first made himself known as a fencing champion. How did his experience as a top-level sportsman in the 1970s and the 1980s influence the rest of his career?
A. A. — That’s right. He took the gold in the foil team event in the Montreal Olympic Games in 1976. Then, there was the boycott in 1980 which was a watershed, not just for Bach, who would have had a good chance of winning another medal in Moscow, but for the Olympic movement as a whole. There is a before and an after Moscow, that is certain.
After that, everything changed. It was under Samaranch, who was IOC president from 1980 to 2001, that the Olympics moved into a higher gear. Starting with the Los Angeles Games – which were, in turn, boycotted by the Soviets – the Olympic Games took on a new dimension. They became a cash-making machine – the 1984 edition was able to reap a surplus of more than $200 million. With Samaranch, the five Olympic rings became the most recognisable trademark in the world and the IOC began to whip up billions. The grand finale of his term came at the Barcelona Games which deeply changed the image and the appearance of the city.
P. I. — Shortly after his arrival at the head of the IOC, difficulties starting piling up for Thomas Bach …
A. A. — When Bach was elected in 2013, he was far from imagining that an avalanche of crises would soon confront him. Firstly, at the winter Games in Sochi in 2014, a scandal blew up over doping in the Russian teams. Then there were the Rio Summer Games in 2016 which ended in financial catastrophe, then the psychodrama around North Korea in the winter of 2018, without forgetting, of course, the Covid-19 pandemic which, for the first time in Olympic history, led to the postponement of the Summer Games and the organisation under strict surveillance of the Tokyo Games a year later. And, to conclude, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia which plunged the world in general and the world of sport in particular into upheaval. I would add that all those years were punctuated by new twists in the interminable saga, both sporting and judicial, of Russian doping … And yet, despite all these disasters, Thomas Bach did not
give up. He repeated in a speech before the Association of National Olympic Committees in Seoul in the autumn of 2022: ‘The Olympic Games must always build bridges. They must never erect walls.’
P. I. — In fact, Thomas Bach has always sought to make the Games an instrument for peace …
A. A. — In effect, and he made sure he had the means. One of his first decisions as president was to grant, in May 2014, the broadcasting rights of the Olympic Games to NBCUniversal for a total of $7.65 billion until 2032. With that agreement, the IOC secured its medium- term future. In a world that he considers eminently ‘fragile’, Thomas Bach attaches great importance to financial security.
Once that stability was assured, in December 2014, Bach pushed through a 40-point reform plan called Agenda 2020 which notably included the creation of an Olympic television channel. In February 2018, he put into motion the ‘New Norm’, a series of 118 measures aiming to review the technical steps by which the Olympic Games are delivered.
In March 2021, the Agenda 2020+5 was adopted, proposing a new roadmap and laying out 15 recommendations based on five principles. The first of these principles was solidarity.
It was in the name of this solidarity that the Russians could take part, as OAR (Olympic Athletes of Russia) in the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang and as the ROC (Russian Olympic Committee) at the Tokyo Olympics and in Beijing in 2022.
It was also in the name of this solidarity that Bach worked in favour of parity between the sexes. At the end of 2022, the IOC had 101 members, of whom 62 had taken up their posts since his arrival. Of these 62 members, 27, or 43.5%, are women.
For the first time in the IOC’s history, the commissions – groups of experts with the mission of making recommendations to the president – are balanced in gender terms: 273 women and 273 men. By comparison, in 2013, when Thomas Bach took up his functions, women only held 20% of the posts in the same commissions. In addition, at the end of 2022, 13 of the 31 commission chairs were women. There again, it was a record.
As for the Executive Board, which has general responsibility for the IOC and ensures respect for the Olympic Charter, it today has five women out of 15 members: Nicole Hoevertsz (vice-president), Nawal El Moutawakel, Mikaela Cojuangco-Jaworski, Kristin Kloster and Emma Terho.
P. I. — Nevertheless, everything is not entirely positive. The IOC’s reputation has been long tarnished by corruption …
A. A. — You are right. The shadow of corruption has been hanging over the IOC for decades. It started with the Los Angeles Games where, for the first time, money was flowing everywhere. After the glittering success of the Barcelona Games, a number of cities wanted to be candidates. That was the beginning of a worldwide circus that was to reach its climax in 2005, 2007 and 2009. In those years, the IOC saw the whole world’s political stars parading through to promote their countries.
Corruption is a very real phenomenon. It occurs notably on two levels: during the procedure of attribution of the Games to favour one or other city and in the negotiation of contracts to build the Olympic installations. It is said that the Sochi Games cost $51 billion. Whether true or not, it doesn’t matter. This colossal figure remains engraved in people’s memories.
P. I. — Faced with these excesses, how did Bach react?
A. A. — From 2016, he reflected on a change in the procedure of attribution. Since 2019, candidacies have no longer been submitted to a vote. That brought an end to the candidate visits that were so conducive to little ‘gifts’. The circus was over. In its place, he set up a discreet and targeted dialogue with ‘all interested parties’, that is to say, no longer with a city, but with several cities, a region or a country. That was how Brisbane, Australia, was designated to organise the Summer Games in 2032.
P. I. — Would you go so far as to say that Thomas Bach has the stuff of a world leader?
A. A. — Absolutely, he is a real world leader. I shall give you two examples. In November 2022, he was invited to speak at the G20 in Bali. He said in substance: ‘Olympic sport needs the participation of all athletes who accept its rules, even and especially if their countries are in conflict or at war. A competition between athletes only coming from countries sharing the same values is not a credible symbol of peace.’ And he added: ‘In this time of division, our role is clear: to unite the world and not to deepen the divisions.’
A little earlier, on Jan. 25, 10 days before the opening ceremony of the Winter Games on Feb. 4, Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, received Mr. Bach for one-on-one talks in Beijing. This was Xi’s first meeting with a foreign dignitary since the beginning of the pandemic two years earlier. It is true that the Chinese president takes a close interest in the Olympic Games. It was he who had supervised the preparations for the Summer Games in 2008. Beijing is, by the way, the first city to have been host to both the Summer and the Winter Games.
Before Thomas Bach took over, it was often said that sport and politics should not mix. The new IOC president gives us the proof that this is not so.
P. I. — Can you give us an example of his involvement in world affairs?
A. A. — The most striking example is the way in which he organised the arrival of North Korean athletes at the Winter Games in 2018. A number of obstacles surfaced along the way – and huge efforts were required to bring together North Korea, South Korea, Japan and the IOC. In the end, North Korea sent 22 athletes to Pyeongchang to take part in five disciplines and, just as in Sydney in 2000 and Athens in 2004, North and South Korean athletes marched together at the opening ceremony. The Korean women’s hockey team included sportswomen from the north and the south. The North Koreans also took part in the downhill skiing, figure skating, short-track speed skating and cross-country skiing. At the same time, North Korea sent a delegation of some 400 people, including the then de facto president, Kim Yong-nam, an orchestra, pom-pom girls and taekwondo players. The following month, Bach went to Pyongyang to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un.
The 2018 Games sent ‘a powerful message’, Bach stated, adding: ‘We hope now that the political world will take advantage of this impetus for dialogue at their level because, now, it is up to the politicians to act.’
He tried to send the same message of peace at the Beijing Games at the beginning of 2022 when war was on the horizon. That time, it did not work. Vladimir Putin had made the journey to Beijing for the opening ceremony and, four days later, his troops were crossing the Ukrainian border. The Olympic ideal has its limits …
P. I. — If the IOC does not have the power to prevent war, can it at least take care of athletes …
A. A. — That is exactly what Thomas Bach has in mind when he says that the most important thing is the athletes, all the athletes without exception. That is why, under his leadership, the IOC devised the principle of an Olympic team for refugees, in partnership with the High Commissioner for Refugees, with the aim of making international opinion aware of the critical situation of refugees. The first team, in Rio in 2016, was made up of 10 athletes of four different nationalities. In Tokyo in 2021, there were 29 from 11 countries.
P. I. — Should Russian athletes be present in Paris in 2024?
A. A. — I should like to recall just the precedent of the Pyeongchang Games in 2018. Bach’s global approach consisted – despite very strong pressure exerted by a certain number of interested parties in the West – of establishing a clear distinction between, on the one hand, Russian athletes permitted to take part in the events and, on the other, the Russian state.
He stated that the fact of allowing the athletes to compete as individuals under the banner of the ‘AOR’ was ‘a recognition of reality’, making it clear that these athletes ‘already had to undergo some degree of collective punishment even if they were individually innocent.’ But, for him, it was in no way useful to humiliate these athletes by depriving them of their origins. Many favoured a total exclusion even before the regular procedure – to which every person and every organisation has the right – had run its course. All those who did not agree with that position were considered ‘non ethical’. Bach’s rejoinder was that he did not see how punishing innocent athletes was more ‘ethical’.
P. I. — Another controversy broke out over rule 50 of the Olympic Charter which outlaws any political expression during the Games …
A. A. — Just after the killing of George Floyd in 2020, voices were raised to seek to have this rule challenged, with the objective being that anti-racism should not be considered a political statement but the norm. Thomas Bach did not conform to that. There again, he referred to the example of the boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games which, in his view, missed its mark. Those who suffered the most were the Western athletes who were stopped from competing. But this measure had no effect on the politics of the Soviet Union. Bach is deeply convinced that the mission of the Olympic Games is to bring together the world’s best athletes, chosen from the 206 national Olympic committees, in a peaceful sporting competition. For him, the Olympic Games are above all about sport.
P. I. — For you who know him well, is he the same man in private as in public?
A. A. — I can tell you that he is a man of absolute loyalty and deeply human. Remember how he reacted when the young skater Kamila Valieva collapsed under stress at the Beijing Games and he did not hesitate to hit out at the ‘chilling’ attitude of her coach.
Of course, Bach is not a saint. No one can get to such a position of responsibility without being capable of taking difficult decisions, especially in an institution such as the IOC where crisis management is part of everyday life. But he dared to make gestures that no one else before him had done. I am talking of the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Games. For 50 years, the IOC never took responsibility for what happened in Munich. No tribute to the victims was organised.
As president, Thomas Bach, a German, simply did what was necessary. For years, the families of the 11 Israelis killed asked for a minute of silence to be observed at the opening ceremony of the Games. In 2021, this long-awaited moment finally happened.
And on September 5, 2022, 50 years to the day after the Munich events, at a ceremony in Tel Aviv, Bach presented his apology for all the time it had taken the IOC to pay homage ‘in an honourable way’ to the victims of that tragedy.
P. I. — You have not really replied to the question of the presence of Russian athletes in 2024. Will they be in Paris?
A. A. — Sometimes, the past is no great help in forecasting the future. But, in this case, I think it can be. In the mind of Thomas Bach who, I repeat, was deeply marked by the boycott of the Moscow Games, the mission of the Olympic and Paralympic Games is to bring the whole world together in peaceful competition without any discrimination. He has said this and repeated it many times: the participation in sporting events should be based exclusively on the sporting merits of an athlete and with respect for the rules of sport …