For nearly 10 years, since he was elected president of the International Olympic Committee, it has been a rare thing for Thomas Bach to be told no.
And for good reason. Despite his many vocal critics, almost all of whom have little to no idea how the IOC or the Olympic movement works in the real world, history will likely record Bach as the most consequential IOC president other than Juan Antonio Samaranch. Perhaps even more so.
Bach’s mantra is simple: change or be changed. He has sought to drag a traditional, conservative, European-oriented institution into the 21st century. He can claim considerable success, implementing major reforms, including the end of the corruption-plagued host-city elections.
Thus what happened Saturday, at an election for the presidency of the Olympic Council of Asia, amounts to the first signs of what may well be not just restlessness but pushback if not potent insurrection in the Olympic movement – one year ahead of Paris 2024 and two years before Bach is due to step down as president.
The IOC picked a fight. It lost. This particular loss may carry significant consequences for Russian participation in the Paris Games. Separately, looking to 2025 and the IOC presidential election, it may – just as in 2013, when Bach was elected – prove decisive.
Our world is changing, all around us, and fast. A new world order is emerging in Olympic power politics, with several of the nations of Asia, and Russia, among those leading the way. It was all there on display Saturday, in Bangkok.
The protagonists
Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait, known throughout the Olympic scene simply as the sheikh, for 30-plus years a powerbroker.
Sheikh Ahmad // Getty Images
His younger brother, Sheikh Talal Fahad al-Sabah, a former president of both the Kuwait Olympic Committee and the Kuwait Football Association.
Umar Kremlev, the Russian who heads the International Boxing Association.
Husain al-Musallam, also of Kuwait, who joined the OCA in 1982 in its international relations department. Since 2005, he has been director general. He is also secretary general at the Kuwait Olympic Committee. Since June 2021, moreover, he has been president of World Aquatics, formerly known as FINA, the swim federation. Once a professional airline pilot, al-Musallam, prefers to be known as the Captain – his Twitter handle is @Captain_Aqua.
Husain al-Musallam at the 2022 world short-course world swim championships // Getty Images
The OCA was founded in 1982 by the brothers’ father, Fahad al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah. It is said he died a hero, defending Dasman Palace on the first day of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The sheik – the older brother – replaced the father. The older son led the OCA for 30 years, 1991-2021. For years, too, he led the IOC’s Solidarity initiative, overseeing the distribution of significant amounts of money worldwide.
The context
The sheikh played a key role in getting Bach elected IOC president in 2013.
Then came a forgery case brought against the sheikh in a Geneva courtroom, and a 2021 conviction. The sheikh has consistently maintained his innocence. The matter is now on appeal.
The sheik self-suspended himself as an IOC member and, further, stepped down as president of the Association of National Olympic Committees when, in November 2018, the charges were brought.
The case, even for those trained in the law, is complex. Why the Swiss authorities opted to bring the matter against a high-ranking foreign national has always been an open question. The sheikh previously has been his country’s Minister of Oil and a secretary general of OPEC.
At the time of prosecution, the sheikh was not a government minister.
On June 18, he once again took high-ranking government office, appointed deputy prime minister and Minister of Defense – part of a new cabinet organized by the son of the Kuwaiti emir, Prime Minister Sheikh Ahmad Nawaf al-Ahmad al-Sabah, a close friend.
Now, and especially in Asia, where such status matters, the sheikh had political juice.
How could the IOC not foresee that the day would come – particularly, say, two weeks before an OCA election – when a Kuwaiti government would find a way to give the sheikh the necessary status to get back in the game?
Inexplicable, really.
It’s not as if the IOC is unaware of the rough and tumble that is the intersection of Kuwaiti royal, tribal, governmental and Olympic politics. From 2015 through 2019, the IOC suspended the Kuwait Olympic Committee because of undue government interference.
To be clear, the sheikh and al-Musallam are both skilled political operators, the word used here entirely as a compliment.
The sheik’s brother can move, too. Who was KOC president during those rough years? Right.
What’s doubly inexplicable, though, is that this OCA presidency devolved into a contest between someone who is a royal and someone, al-Musallam, who is not. How could the IOC, usually so skilled at reading the room, be so naïve as to believe a non-royal could win?
On top of which – Kremlev.
Last month, the IOC banished the IBA, the boxing federation, to the Olympic wilderness, stripping it of recognition.
The IOC knows well that Kremlev has ties at the highest levels in Russia. The IBA undertook reforms detailed in a report laid out by the Canadian professor Richard McLaren. The IOC didn’t care. Russia is an exceedingly difficult problem right now for the IOC. Booting the IBA just made it all the more so.
Why?
Because last December the IOC announced a plan to try to qualify for Russian athletes for Paris 2024 through the OCA.
The Asian Games, with about 25,000 athletes, twice the size of a Summer Olympics, are due to be held in Hangzhou, China, from September 23 to October 8. In May, Bach toured the grounds, an indication of their import.
Singh, the temporary president, was the one announced as carrying water for the Russians-to-Paris plan. This was not credible. The only one with enough political clout to get the Russians into OCA qualifiers was al-Musallam, connected since 1982 or 2005, take your pick.
The Russians have made life difficult for the IOC since 2014 if not before. Nonetheless, the fundamental premise of the Olympic Games is to invite all the nations of the world. All means all. All means the Russians.
That means finding a way to get them qualified.
The IOC, just days before this OCA election, touted that it had received a unanimous endorsement from the world’s 120 non-aligned nations, a declaration that having all 206 national Olympic committees in Paris – note, Russia – would be a “strong symbol of [the] unity of humanity.”
Which is great. But how to get the Russians to Paris?
Knowing full well that if the sheikh were to win, it would have to deal with him on the road to Paris – that is, to get the Russians qualified in OCA-sanctioned events – who was the candidate the IOC was backing, and vigorously, in this OCA election?
OK.
The election run-up
To begin, it is widely assumed that Sheik Ahmad Nawaf was lobbying on behalf of Sheikh Talal.
Then, who arrived in Bangkok? The sheikh – that is, Sheikh Ahmad.
Now it was on.
The world is both the same and changing. Bach has sought to implement far-reaching change in the way the Olympic world works. Unquestionably, much of that is for the good. But some change in the world cannot be contained or directed – and that is what was on display in Bangkok, a new way, one in which nations far away from Lausanne are not so willing to fall in line anymore. We are in a new, a different, time – one perhaps ushered in by the war in Ukraine, albeit not in the way the 40 or so nations of the West would like to believe. This is the reshaping of the Olympic order in the 21st century.
This, too, is the touchpoint of the IBA story. Nations such as China, India, South Africa, the former Soviet client states and, especially, the Gulf states are asserting themselves.
Now the IOC found itself up against the combined efforts of the sheikh and Kremlev – representing Russia and its many tentacles, even if Russia is hardly a member of the OCA.
The IOC’s chief ethics officer, Paquerette Girard Zapelli, wrote the sheikh a July 5 letter. She said the IOC had been informed he would be visiting Bangkok from July 6 to 8 and “such travel could be considered as an interference with the OCA activities and may be taken into consideration by the IOC Ethics Commission at the moment your situation will be considered by this Commission in the view of the recommendations to the IOC Executive Board.”
Obvious, clearly fundamental problem with this letter:
Girard Zapelli wrote to the sheikh in his role as “self-suspended” IOC member, with copies to Singh; Ser Miang Ng, the IOC member from Singapore who in this context was serving as chair of the OCA electoral commission; and Christophe de Kepper, the IOC director general. But: since June 18, the sheikh had been Kuwaiti deputy prime minister and Minister of Defense. In these roles, he was 100% entitled to come and go to Thailand as he might please. What purchase did the IOC, always – always – careful to claim autonomy from governments, have in this instance to tell a senior government leader what he could or not do?
Moreover, like a whack upside the head, another dose of blunt common sense: the sheikh also now enjoys diplomatic immunity anew. One might suggest that in the interest of bilateral relations between sovereign nations it might be prudent for the forgery case to, you know, find a genial resolution?
Back to Bangkok.
Sheikh Talal // OCA
Singh wrote Sheikh Talal a two-page letter that said the OCA had received copies of the letters – there was also one dated July 3 – that Girard Zapelli had sent to Sheikh Ahmad. “We have acknowledged their content and we assume and hope that everyone will comply with the obligations under the Olympic charter and the OCA Constitution.”
The Singh letter also said al-Musallam “can and has the duty to attend different committee meetings” – meaning he was free to be around and to do whatever there, wink-wink – but “he did not and is not allowed to attend any meeting related to any election.”
So, OK. Per the rules, one candidate could be around “committee meetings” but the other was essentially radioactive, got it, everyone? Oh, oopsies, brothers, one a year older, from Europe who can really tell them apart? Or — is that the point?
It would be fascinating for experts in election control and in governance to study this balloting. Who was trying to ensure “fairness”? In what ways? In the letter of the rules? Or the spirit? Or was someone – name your party – trying to game, to manipulate, this voting?
Did the sheikh attend the General Assembly? Not on your life. He stayed in his hotel suite.
Did the Russians make calls? What do you think?
Umar Kremlev // IBA
When the Russians made calls, do you think they were told by several of those they had called something like this: wow, the IOC had been on the line before you but, you know, you make a really interesting argument. What do you think?
The election
The night before a close election is always so interesting.
This one all the more so because, if the stories are to be believed, and there is no reason not to, a vote, even just one, that might have been leaning one way ended up going the other.
Elections are, in the end, about math.
The OCA counts 45 members. In a twist a Hollywood screenwriter probably could not have dreamed up, the Syrian Olympic Committee could not cast its vote: secretary general Nasser al-Saied died.
The winning candidate nonetheless, per the OCA, needed 23 votes, a simple majority.
Predictably, just before voting started, the chair of the OCA ethics committee warned of signs of “irregularities” – unsupported and otherwise unexplained – to be investigated *after the voting.
Again, OK.
Sheikh Talal got 24 votes, al-Musallam 20.
Math: Sheikh Talal got precisely one more than he needed. One.
Follow up: al-Musallam was immediately named OCA “Honorary Life Vice-President.” What does that mean? Anything? Will he stay on, given his World Aquatics duties? Unclear.
Is Sheikh Talal merely a placeholder for his older brother? No one knows. He said to the delegates, don’t compare me to Sheikh Ahmad “because I am sure I am going to lose.”
Does Sheikh Ahmad lose? Not often. He has a long memory. And our world is changing, a new world order emerging. It’s just as Thomas Bach says – change or be changed.