Six months ago, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach published a remarkable white paper about the state of Olympics, as he saw it, amid the pandemic. More remarkably, it drew — and yet more remarkably still, over the months since has drawn — comparatively little media attention. Like almost zero.
The think piece was called — you’ve got to love this title — “Olympism and Corona.”
If Roger Goodell wrote such a piece about the state of the NFL, or Adam Silver about the NBA, odds are it would be the stuff of hot takes on sports radio and cable TV, and for weeks. Here was Bach thoughtfully trying to sort out the new realities of the most complex puzzle the world knows, the Olympic Games, in reaction to the shifting realities of a global pandemic. Reaction: mostly crickets.
IOC president Thomas Bach in the photo accompanying the April 29 "‘Olympism and Corona’ white paper // IOC
He deserved better, particularly because in the fourth copy block, entitled “Social Impact,” third paragraph, the IOC president signaled to the entire world — if, like, anyone was paying attention, which obviously they were not — that esports ought to be taken seriously. He used the word “urgently.” The IOC almost never uses the word “urgently.” This time, though, it did.
“… We encourage all our stakeholders even more urgently to ‘consider how to govern electronic and virtual forms of their sport and explore opportunities with game publishers,’ “ Bach said, noting a sentence from the December 2019 iteration of what is called an “Olympic Summit,” featuring select Olympic personalities.
Six months have passed. Where is the urgency? Apparently taking a nap by the fountain lit blue last weekend by the Olympic Museum in Lausanne in honor of the United Nations. What, from the IOC side, has been done in regard to esports? Virtually (pun intended) nothing.
Except, it turns out, for a letter on IOC stationery now circulating that underscores both just how problematic esports is for the IOC and — despite the IOC president’s keen understanding that urgency must be afoot — the huge disconnect between, on the one hand, the IOC, a traditional, conservative, 125-year-old institution that moves with the caution of a battleship and, on the other, the new world of video gaming, which is nimble, agile and, oh, yeah, rolling in cash and, besides, has all the leverage, because it boasts the demographic the IOC craves, teens and young people.
To be clear: the president gets it. The issue: do the people around him?
The letter, dated Oct. 27, is a classic. Why?
Right now, there are two organizations: the International Esports Federation and the Global Esports Federation. The former has been around for more than 10 years. The latter, headquartered in Singapore and launched just last December, has shown tremendous growth in just 10 months.
The IOC problem here, and this not uncommon in Lausanne bureaucracy, is doing nothing but making it seem like something. In this instance, the nothing-ness is accentuated if not exacerbated by the signatories to the Oct. 27 letter. And all of it stands in direct contrast to “urgency.”
Bluntly, the world is moving too fast. And the IOC is at considerable risk of being left behind — like at the station holding an umbrella, while, to use a metaphor from a different time, the esports train rockets down the tracks.
The numbers are obscene, already. Nearly 40 percent of the world is already playing video games — and this is before 5G changes everything. Streaming viewership across Twitch, YouTube and Facebook Gaming ran to 7.46 billion hours between July and September, up from 3.89 billion in the third quarter of 2019, a nearly 92 percent increase, the Verge reported. Nintendo (just to pick one) reported $1.4 billion in operating profit in the April-June quarter, up 428 percent from the same period last year; sales of the company’s Switch and Switch Lite grew 167 percent to 5.68 million units in the quarter.
To these numbers — which the pandemic unqualifiedly has accentuated and amplified — the IOC purportedly has established what it, in IOC speak, calls an ELG, an “Esports and Gaming Liaison Group.”
Chaired by David Lappartient, head of the UCI, the cycling federation, the letter notes in the first paragraph that it also “includes several IF representatives.” Granted, this letter is addressed to presidents and secretaries-general of the IFs but it isn’t until nearly the end of the letter — the 11th paragraph already — that it gets around to mentioning the actors in the esports space, the “game publishers, platforms, athletes and players.”
It’s precisely because of exactly this sort of seeming IOC disdain for the publishers, platforms and, most importantly, the gamers that the ELG has done zip, zero, nada since the July 2018 IOC esports forum in Lausanne and why the publishers have all but had it with the IOC: why should they spend time, money and resource on the IOC when they have money to make and the IOC seemingly can’t be bothered to understand who they are, what they do and what sort of mutualities might be served by working together?
Here is further evidence of the disconnect.
There are four signers to the letter. Lappartient, as ELG chair, is the lead. He is not an IOC member.
As for the other three:
Raffaele Chiulli, president of the umbrella sports confederation called GAISF, is not an IOC member.
Francesco Ricci Bitti, former head of the tennis federation and still head of the summer Olympic sports federation, is not an IOC member. Ricci Bitti is 78 years old, turning 79 in January.
Gian Franco Kasper, head of the ski federation (since 1998) and also president of the winter Olympic sports federation, was an IOC member from 2000 to 2018. He is 76, turning 77 in January.
So — four white guys, two born when World War II was raging, one of whom (Kasper) had to make a Holocaust-related apology three years ago … when the world is diverse, when esports demonstrably offers a way in for everyone, everywhere, and there’s no urgency, no nothing to this letter, and you wonder why the IOC is in danger of watching that train rumble away?
“Of course,” the last line of the letter says, “we also remain available to discuss directly with you and support you in any questions you may have or strategies you may be developing.”
Bluntly, again, the IOC needs help.
It doesn’t matter whether esports is ever in the Olympics. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. As the esports community would tell you, the most important thing is to be in the room. The IOC has now dithered away nearly three years.
Maybe there’s an elegant solution that’s so obvious — go back to the “celebrate humanity” tagline, feature esports as part of a bridge in the timeline between the Olympics and Paralympics (in the spirit of Salt Lake City 2002, as part of a broader arts and culture festival, one of the things the Games are badly missing). In the words of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, isn’t it time for the IOC to lean in — to esports?
Like, urgently.