Jacques Rogge, the eighth president of the International Olympic Committee, has died, the International Olympic Committee announced Sunday, and now closes a chapter in Olympic history.
He was 79.
The fullness of time, as it always does, will tell all.
For now, it is enough to say that Rogge was a bridge — a figure of humanity and stability — between arguably the most important of the IOC presidents, Juan Antonio Samaranch, and the ninth and current president, Thomas Bach, who against considerable currents is vigorously trying to institute a series of reforms aimed at pulling the original 19th century construct that is the IOC into the 21st century.
Jacques Rogge // IOC / Richard Juilliart
Samaranch, IOC president from 1980-2001, did nothing less than literally save the institution when, after the terrorism and boycotts of the 1970s, its very survival was politically and economically under siege. With the help of the 1984 Los Angeles Games and Peter Ueberroth, who showed the IOC that marketing and television revenues were the way, Samaranch rebuilt the IOC into one of the world’s most recognizable brands. But then the Salt Lake City bid scandal, which erupted in late 1998, threatened to undo everything — Samaranch staying on to see through a 50-point series of reforms.
Rogge, president from 2001 through 2013, was a three-time Olympic sailor from Belgium who had turned to sports politics, and to follow through on the obvious metaphor, what he brought to the presidency was, big picture, more or less what the IOC needed — a lengthy period, after the Salt Lake affair, of calm seas.
It’s that calm that has enabled Bach to aim for far-reaching reforms. Consider, for instance, the bid process, no longer a global carnival but instead a one-to-one discussion between the IOC and a prospective partner. This is how Brisbane, Australia, recently landed the 2032 Summer Games.
Rogge’s key initiative: the Youth Games. It remains unclear whether the Youth Games will survive. The 2022 edition, set for Dakar, Senegal, has been pushed back to 2026.
Rogge hardly lacked will or imagination. He could be extraordinarily personable. He assuredly knew how to manipulate the necessary processes to get what he wanted. It’s that during his time he was asked — metaphorically, figuratively, politically, diplomatically — to be what he was.
The IOC was not seeking during the Rogge years an array of imaginative, sweeping reforms.
Instead, Rogge was asked to be — here’s another sailing metaphor — the steady captain.
The IOC cabinet — that is, its administration — became far more professionalized. This was because Rogge, though trained as an orthopedic surgeon, was at heart something of a bureaucrat. He ramped up the process of running the IOC in the style of a 20th-century corporate entity.
A very Eurocentric entity.
The IOC has always been intensely Eurocentric, and Rogge was — if this is possible — even more so. He was president of the European Olympic Committees before assuming the IOC presidency, and though his English could be flawless, it was always obvious that he preferred French. Like the time he corrected an American reporter’s pronunciation of the French town “Annecy” at a news conference amid the 2018 Winter Games bid race.
The history books will show that, yes, during the Rogge years the IOC was expansionist in its way, reaching out to Rio for the 2016 Games and Sochi for 2014. In hindsight, would the IOC wish to have those decisions back?
Rogge had a particularly uneven relationship with the United States, personally and professionally, and historians will do well to examine this at length. Sunday’s Associated Press obituary dutifully noted that Rogge resolved a long-running dispute with the United States Olympic Committee over certain revenue shares. But that dispute ran almost the entire length of Rogge’s terms. Why was it allowed to persist for so long — that is, why was the USOC put at such a disadvantage for so many years? Moreover, Chicago, despite President Obama’s in-person plea at the 2009 Copenhagen session, got crushed in the 2016 election won by Rio. Baseball and softball got booted from the Games program. And more.
And yet — on a winter’s night in 2012, here in Los Angeles, Rogge happily sat for a Q&A for more than an hour, taking any and all questions, and then when his turn on stage was over, and the program turned to other matters, instead of ducking out (the IOC president! the important man! things to do!), Rogge merely took a seat — like everyone else in the audience —and listened with great interest.
After, he was glad to take casual questions from and chat with those who came up to say hi.
This, it turned out, after he and his wife, Anne, had — let’s say — an unusual stay at a downtown LA hotel. Which they had not made a fuss about. Though they certainly could have.
He was hardly autocratic or imperious. He was hugely approachable, and especially if you knew him. Then he always — always — asked about family and children and so on.
One of the — if not the — great sadnesses of the Rogge presidency is that he was significantly weakened physically during the last couple of years of his term. Everyone close to the movement knew. It is a great tribute to him that he soldiered on. One time in wintry weather in South Korea, touring the national training center, he could barely walk; no matter; he fulfilled his duty, seeing the sites and talking earnestly with the coaches and athletes.
This was Jacques Rogge — in his core being, he had a passionate duty, an obligation, to the IOC, to the movement, to sport and, most, to the athletes of the world.
He cared, and deeply, about the movement, and particularly about the athletes.
As Bach said in a statement released Sunday by the IOC, “First and foremost, Jacques loved sport and being with athletes — and he transmitted this passion to everyone who knew him. His joy in sport was infectious.”
Again, history will tell us more, much more. For now, Bach’s words make for a lovely way to remember the eighth IOC president. Jacques Rogge did love sport and being with the athletes of the Olympic Games.
During his presidency, truly, it’s what the IOC and Olympic movement needed.
Because after the events of Salt Lake, Jacques Rogge’s passion translated into stability — and, most of all, a sense that things could, once again. be OK.