Is the Olympic movement at an inflection point?
Let’s face it, the Games are prone to strong sentiments and strong statements. It’s easy to get swept away by the passion and the emotion that the Olympics evoke – after all, that’s the source of their appeal.
But if that question has ever been worth asking, perhaps it’s now.
This week, on September 10, it will be a full 10 years since Thomas Bach was elected president of the International Olympic Committee. In the run-up to the election in Buenos Aires in 2013, Bach’s campaign – his ‘manifesto,’ in Olympic jargon – was based on a slogan he called “unity in diversity.” He used a symphony as a metaphor for the Olympic movement, with himself as conductor.
Thomas Bach, the evening he was elected 10 years ago in Buenos Aires // IOC
As a candidate, this was Bach’s premise: “Dialogue among ourselves is the key to shaping the Olympic future together: balancing interests, and finding reasonable solutions. This kind of internal dialogue means, first of all, dialogue with and among the members, dialogue between the IOC and the NOCs and IFs,” the national Olympic committees and international sports federations.
Perhaps he really believed this. It’s easy to believe he did.
But now we have 10 years and, as Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
As president, Bach and his administration have been punched and punched. A lot.
It may be that no president has ever been asked to confront such a nonstop succession of crises – Russian doping and defiance, to Covid-19, to war in Europe, and more.
At any rate, somewhere along the way, that upbeat 2013 call for dialogue and collaboration drifted to a management style that some number of observers and for sure his critics deride as too rigid, that they say relies far too significantly on a closed circle of council.
Most consequential president ever?
To be clear, this is not to diminish the president’s push to bring the IOC, a traditional and conservative institution, in important and meaningful ways into the 21st century. It needed that. Lord knows.
To that end, history will almost surely – and rightly – view Bach as the most consequential IOC president outside of Juan Antonio Samaranch, who served from 1980-2001. Maybe even the most influential, given everything.
Did the Games in Tokyo and Beijing happen, given everything? History says yes. Here, a pause, because Bach – and his team – deserve enormous credit for seeing that the 2020/1 and 2022 Games did, in fact, happen. It is something of a mystery that he, and they, to this day have not gotten the due, the worldwide praise, they genuinely deserve for pulling off two Games roughly six months apart.
The main hall of the media center at the Beijing 2022 Games // IOC
Consider: there was no inherited playbook (sly reference intended), no guidebook, no established protocols, no what-should-we-do to refer to. He and they were literally making up the rules with two different organizing committees as they went along, day by day. For two plus-years it was up to 18 hours, often more, each day. No weekends off. No holidays off. The pressure, from anywhere and everywhere, was enormous. And they pulled it off, both Games.
Did this necessitate decision-making in the hands of a select – a trusted – few?
Or perhaps was this the plan all along, to concentrate decision-making in the presidential office and a select few trusted confidants. And the pandemic and the incredible demand of pulling off two Covid Games within six months of each other made the means justify the end.
Which leads, in a roundabout way, to what just happened in Budapest and what’s coming up in Paris.
The just-concluded track and field world championships in Budapest were everything the world’s No. 3 most significant global sports event – behind only the Summer Games and the FIFA men’s World Cup – should be.
The action on the track was world-class. Off, there was music, art, dance, fun, most of all engagement, a rightful celebration of humanity that, it was clear, so many from around the world warmly welcomed after years of pandemic shut-in.
What Budapest should be is a springboard to next summer’s Paris Olympics.
In Budapest with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Per the IOC website: “During their three-hour meeting, the two leaders discussed Hungary’s contribution to world sport, the upcoming Olympic Games Paris 2024 and the current geopolitical situation” // IOC
Perhaps the Paris Olympics will, in the end, prove to be a celebration just like Budapest. Maybe they will be the tonic Bach and the IOC are gambling on after a run that has seen Sochi (reported $51 billion, doping), Rio (chaos, corruption) and then the Asian triple that, yes, produced an amazing peace-building moment between the Koreas in PyeongChang, one Bach and the IOC deserve significantly more credit than they have largely gotten for bringing about, but then brought postponed Covid Tokyo (no fans, more corruption) and, six or so months later, the weird funk that was Covid Beijing (draconian lockdowns, some fans, the Valieva case).
Pause again, to revisit that nonstop succession of crises thing. The stretch of Games with which Bach has been confronted since that moment in Buenos Aires in 2013 – he perhaps has been handed maybe the unluckiest run one could have ever imagined.
Strike that. No one could have imagined this.
Then again, crisis management is ever the order of the day at the IOC.
So – if it’s not a crisis, is the IOC at a genuine inflection point?
The situation as it really is
The three Asian Games have indisputably depressed TV ratings even as the television landscape is fracturing, the cable model fast and furious giving way to streaming, where there is not enough money to support a billion-dollar enterprise like the Olympic Games. NBC is paying $7.65 billion to the IOC through 2032. Behind the scenes, the network seems intent on finding every which way to cut costs for Paris 2024. Meantime, corporate sponsors increasingly are wondering – where’s the value? Increasingly discussed is the possibility that four top-level sponsors, perhaps more, are out after 2024; in all, the contributions of the four at issue total more than $1 billion. And it goes without saying that all of this also affects the LA28 sales process.
Paris, given 2024 in a joint allocation in 2017 with Los Angeles for 2028, is the first Summer Games awarded under Bach’s presidency – and under his reform package, dubbed Agenda 2020, now Agenda 2020+5.
But now comes perhaps something of an existential challenge to those reforms, seemingly all that Bach has sought to effect.
The Russians, and the long-running saga of their doping and whether because of the war in Ukraine they are in or out for Paris -- they are a piece of the puzzle but not, not hardly, despite the outsized attention that situation gets in the western mainstream press, the No. 1 drag on the Olympic movement.
Instead, it is corruption, that old specter of the Olympics dressed in haute couture. It reared its head in Rio (2016), in Tokyo (2020) and, now, it seems – in Paris, in 2024.
It is against the backdrop of what’s coming that the IOC must confront this basic truth:
The Olympic Games are all about magic. That magic is the indisputable source of their global appeal and commercial interest. The moments, the memories, the celebrations like we saw in Budapest at the track championships, the celebration of humanity, of the best of us. Winning? Only three countries care about winning: the United States, Russia and China. For everyone else in our broken and fragile world, it’s about an aspirational ideal that we can, for all our flaws, be better. That’s what makes the magic happen. Makes it possible.
Corruption kills all of that.
But so does poor planning, mission overreach and, in a phrase, forgetting about the girl who brought you to the dance – the Olympic brand.
All of this blunts consumer passion, which in turn blunts sponsor investment, which in turn blunts television interest.
Like it or not, without commercial and broadcast partners (read: money) we have no Games, no dreams, no inspiration, no celebration of our collective humanity.
So, back to the inflection point question.
If not a black swan, what?
Inflection points happen either one of two ways: the immediacy of a black swan event, or the gradual devolution of a process or ideal into inefficiency or worse, irrelevance.
Here are the facts as we can readily understand them: waning interest from established sponsors, unprecedented geopolitical and economic challenges, Olympic family politics and power struggles, declining TV ratings and questionable relevance (putting it gently) among Gen Z consumers.
Thus, one can credibly exclude the black swan option.
But wait. There’s more.
It was a one-day story, if that, when, in June, French police raided the offices of the Paris 2024 organizing committee and SOLIDEO, the public body responsible for much of the construction and infrastructure around next year’s Games. The raids were tied to inquiries into financial improprieties with contracts and public funds, the French national financial prosecutor’s office has said.
In the United States, it’s not uncommon for police to execute a search warrant – despite the requirement for “particularity” in things to be described – at the start of an investigation. Then they build out a case. In France, it’s more or less the opposite. They already know what they need to know. The search is, if you will, often the coup de grace, the cherry on the top of the cake.
French and Olympic insiders are waiting with some significant measure of dread for the announcement of what’s coming – likely, they say, in September or October.
How do you square the ethos of the Games with the reality of, as a French police anti-corruption unit put it in June, an investigation into “illegal conflict of interests, embezzlement of public funds, favoritism and concealment of favoritism targeting several contracts”?
You can’t. You can’t square it.
You open up the windows, let the sunlight in and let the chips fall where they may.
The next IOC president, to be elected in March 2025, now increasingly understood in backstage chatter to formally take office on Olympic Day that June, will inherit an Olympic movement unlike any of his or her predecessors.
The urge for dramatic and seismic changes will be loud and strong.
The Olympic movement did not reach this challenging time in its history overnight, nor will the solutions and the path ahead feature remedies likely to be immediate.
The movement has incredible assets and resources that have served it well for 129 years. The trick will be discovering which of those assets and resources can be tweaked and changed, and those that must be outright discarded to meet the challenges of a new world and possibly a new world order.
This brand is in its third millennium. It’s still standing. Let that sink in.
The bet is not against the Olympic movement. But any bet must be set against its continued relevance and commercial appeal and, too, include a sober accounting of what has been done well, and then again what could have been better, over the past decade.
The Olympic movement needs, desperately, to move beyond what’s coming in just a few weeks. It endures, and more, because it gives the world magic. It gives the world – hope.