One of my favorite memories of Gianna Angelopoulos, the dynamic businesswoman who rescued the Athens 2004 Summer Olympics, came the year before, at an International Olympic Committee session in Prague.
Holding court in the mezzanine area of the Prague Hilton, smoking a cigar (for real), she explained that running an Olympic organizing committee is, in fact, all about crisis management. In Athens, there were untold numbers of crises. Her job was bringing those crises to heel. Which she was doing — and, ultimately, did.
“The moment you understand that you actually do crisis management,” she was saying, “then it’s good.
“Then you feel control things. You can always expect the unexpected.”
Tokyo Olympic organizing committee chief Yoshiro Mori, left, and former Japan Football Association President Saburo Kawabuchi at a Feb. 3 news conference in Tokyo // Kyodo News via Getty Images
The crisis right now in Tokyo, where the 2020/1 Games are due to open in five short months, is that the longstanding president of the organizing committee, 83-year-old Yoshiro Mori, will resign Friday over a sexist remark he made at a Feb. 3 meeting. He said that women talk too much.
Mori has since apologized six ways to Sunday, but still. The issue is of course that he said it but more — it’s that he thought it, because then he said it. The problem is confronting that thinking. And here we get to the real challenge.
According to Japanese media reports, Mori is to be replaced by former Japan Football Association president and mayor of the Olympic village, Saburo Kawabuchi. He is 84.
This is profoundly unfortunate.
This is the very definition of missing an opportunity.
Optics: zero. Vision impairment: 10 of 10.
As Kyodo News put it, the expected transition “suggests that Japan remains a male-dominated country with elder leaders gripping power in many areas.”
Here, it would appear that I am on the same wavelength with Michael Payne, the IOC’s former marketing director (disclosure: we did not communicate in the writing of this piece and I did not see this tweet and others until after I had written this column, so this paragraph is a late fact-check add-on):
To circle back:
Tokyo 2020 is on the wrong side of right.
It’s in what Mori thinks that lies the enormous work yet to be done. What he unearthed is another reminder of the systemic issues that demand the impact of change that go beyond symbolism to become embedded in the day-to-day lives of a place’s, a nation’s, cultural, political, economic, governmental, sporting and other institutions.
Those changes have to start somewhere. That is — can be — the power of the Olympics. To be that signal of change. As IOC president Thomas Bach has said of the Tokyo 2020 Games in a different context, referring to the pandemic, these Olympics can be a “beacon of hope.”
Well?
If you’re going to say you’re going to have equality and equity, keystones of the Olympic movement, you have to live it.
What better way to show that Japan can embrace — no, has embraced — those principles than by using Mori’s moment, if not perhaps lifetime, of ignorance as an inflection point to not just embrace but advance those things the Olympic movement purports to stand for?
And, as well, some if not many of the nation’s most important corporate entities?
Akio Toyoda, president of Toyota, which is also a key Olympic sponsor, said Wednesday it was “truly regrettable that [Mori’s remarks] are different from the values Toyota has cherished.”
It’s not as if there aren’t qualified women in the country.
For goodness sake, this includes the mayor of Tokyo, Yurio Koike, who just last July was reelected with nearly 60 percent of the vote, a landslide, and surely understands that she can and will leverage this moment to her political advantage.
Mori’s resignation was signaled Tuesday when the IOC, which at first had accepted one of his many apologies, then switched gears — amid the worldwide outcry — and declared his remarks “absolutely inappropriate.” After that, it was simply a matter of time until he was out.
The rest of that statement, which has largely been ignored by the world’s media, is telling for what it says and — as ever — for what it doesn’t.
Because if the Japanese can do better, so, too, can the Olympic movement.
First, giving the IOC credit where it’s due.
As the IOC ticks off in the Tuesday release:
— The IOC expects roughly 49 percent of the athletes in Tokyo this summer to be female. It has asked all 206 national Olympic committees to send, for the first time, at least one female athlete on their teams. It is encouraging all 206 to have their flag carried by one female and one male athlete at the opening ceremony.
— Anita DeFrantz, a bronze medalist in 1976, will be its first vice president in Tokyo. She has for decades been an advocate for women’s empowerment. Though her term on the IOC’s policy-making executive board is due to come to a close, expect DeFrantz to play a key role to and through the Los Angeles 2028 Games.
— The chair and vice-chair of the IOC athletes’ commission are female: Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe and Danka Bartekova of Slovakia. The latter has qualified for the Tokyo Games. The commission is currently made up of 11 women and six men.
— The chef de mission of the Refugee Team will be Tegla Loroupe, the first African woman to win the New York Marathon and three-time Olympian.
— Women now make up 37.5 percent of IOC membership, up from 21 percent since the IOC adopted what it calls Agenda 2020, a 40-point reform plan in 2014.
— Women now make up a full third of the executive board, almost half of the IOC commissions (compared with 20.3 percent pre-Agenda 2020) and 53 percent of IOC staff.
Bach can legitimately be criticized for many things. But he has made a significant effort not just to talk the talk but walk the walk when it comes to allyship. Change cannot and does not come overnight. It only happens because someone has the vision and the will to make it happen.
Where change in the Olympic movement is seriously lacking is in the international federations and national Olympic committees.
As things stand, there are three female IF presidents: Marisol Casado in triathlon, Kate Caithness in curling and the recently elected Annika Sorenstam in golf.
That’s it.
In skiing, Sarah Lewis — who had served as secretary general for many years — was deposed last year in a very abrupt and public way.
It goes without saying that the situation is much the same at those 206 national Olympic committees. The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee is a notable exception, with chief executive officer Sarah HIrshland and board chair Susanne Lyons.
It is the case, meanwhile, that the track and field federation, World Athletics, is led by a man, Seb Coe, now in his second four-year term.
But Coe, too, has been an ally — and WA offers a case study in how to effect change.
Ximena Restrepo at a news conference at the track and field championships in Doha, Qatar, in 2019 // Getty Images
Coe has been forceful in demanding that WA develop and implement a formalized system to identify, recruit and then emplace women from around the globe into positions of leadership.
Among four key governance reforms undertaken in 2016, one was explicit: “better gender balance.”
WA’s policy-making Council has 26 elected members. The reforms changed the rules to impose minimum gender requirements for the 2019, 2023 and 2027 Council elections. Though this is a little technical, hang with it here because these messy details are how change, real change, happens:
— Seven of each gender for the elections in 2019
— 10 of each for the elections in 2023 (40%)
— 13 of each for the elections in 2027 and thereafter (50%)
Another reform: one of the vice-presidential slots, beginning with the 2019 election, had to go to a woman. Ximena Restrepo, bronze medalist in the 400 at the Barcelona 1992 Games, the first woman from Colombia to win an Olympic medal in track and field, was elected.
“I hope that, through athletics, we can help more women all over the world achieve their goals and show their capabilities,” Restrepo said in a March 7 Q&A with the federation website last year, immediately before the pandemic became a global reality.
“There are still many countries where it is very difficult for women to practice any sort and where achieving positions of leadership is unthinkable. That’s why I believe that World Athletics, though working toward achieving gender equity in athletics as a whole, will hopefully provide an example for other organizations to follow.”
World Athletics, formerly the IAAF, was founded in 1912.
Restrepo thus became its first female vice president in … 107 years.
This is how change happens.
Even in systems where old men have — seemingly forever — been in charge.