Like the pretty pictures from Paris last summer, the veneer would suggest all is well in the Olympic landscape.
For its part, the IOC would like you to believe everything is hunky-dory.
Except:
Sponsors are saying buh-bye. TV ratings are not what they were. The IOC is squeezing organizing committees. For years, the international sports federations have seen their IOC funding flatline. Athletes, purportedly at the center of the Olympics, report a struggle to buy groceries.
Someone has to pay for the IOC’s fancy new building by the shores of Lake Geneva, the doubling of staff numbers, executive staff salaries into the millions of dollars, and the cost, believed to be into the hundreds of millions of dollars, of the largely unseen and unknown vanity project that is the Olympic Channel.
There is more—so much more. This is why the IOC presidential election, set for March 20, will be a defining moment as the institution enters the second quarter of the 21st century.
At the so-called “Olympic Summit” in Lausanne in December 2024 // IOC / Christophe Moratal
Thomas Bach, in charge since 2013, is termed out.
The IOC is inherently a conservative enterprise that gives lip service to change. However, the IOC needs real change.
The issues and fissures are real.
World Rugby buried in its website a Jan. 15 announcement that said the sport saw “record match attendances and broadcast audience figures for the last men’s Rugby World Cup in France in 2023, and Rugby Sevens at the Paris 2024 Olympics”— and was laying off 35 of its 277 staff, 13%.
The CBC reported Feb. 5 that the Canadian Olympic Committee is running a $600,000 deficit this year. The last increase in “core federal funding” for Canada’s 62 summer and winter national sports federations? 2005. “We’re down to skin and bones,” Freestyle Canada chief executive officer Peter Judge said.
In December, the IOC said its “already secured” revenues — looking out to 2032 — are $13.5 billion. “The participants welcomed this as evidence that the Olympic brand is stronger than ever,” a ‘communique’ from key leaders declared.
There’s clearly a disconnect here.
This disconnect is at the core of the upcoming election.
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The world has changed far too dramatically over the past dozen years even as Bach, whose mantra was “change or be changed,” unequivocally and irrefutably prized stability — and control.
Seven candidates are running for the IOC presidency. Two, maybe three, are widely believed to be legitimate contenders: Seb Coe, Kirsty Coventry, and Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr.
The question: who is best prepared to meet this moment? Because this moment is transformational.
In summary, the president will take over an institution that seems stable. It is not. The entire enterprise rests on the $7.65 billion NBC television deal, which expires in 2032. Terrestrial television is on the way out.
An even bigger change:
In real time, we are living a fundamental, radical transformation in how we relate to the institutions in our world.
The IOC is insidiously institutional. Bach has acknowledged, time and again, that the IOC is part of The Establishment.
In 2014, more or less at the beginning of Bach’s presidency, Martin Gurri, a former CIA analyst of “global media,” self-published a book, “The Revolt of the Public,” that would predict the rise of populism along with Brexit, Black Lives Matter and the MAGA movement.
The book argues that social media and the Internet have fundamentally changed the public’s relationship to institutions and power.
Gurri is finally breaking into the mainstream. In a Feb. 25 interview in the New York Times, he said, “What became very clear was that the set of institutions that hold up modern life in the 21st century — the government, the media, business, academia — were shaped in the 20th century. Very top down, very hierarchical …”
The internet operates outside of that. What sets the agenda on the web is “institutional failure and elite failure.” The main driver: “a gigantic erosion of trust in the institutions.”
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This “erosion of trust” is why early in the Bach presidency, the IOC lost a string of referendums; beyond, cities in western democracies said no time and again to the notion of staging the Games. Gurri notes in an added chapter for the book the September 2016 episode when the mayor of Rome killed its 2024 bid: “The enraged mandarin at the head of the national Olympic committee called the decision ‘demagogic and populist.’ He lives in a city of palaces and hierarchies — the mayor, in the Rome of trash removal and sewage disposal.”
The “mandarin” Gurri describes is Giovanni Malagò, who in 2019 was made an IOC member. He currently leads the 2026 Milano-Cortina organizing committee.
After the string of referendum defeats, Bach drove a change to the bid process. Cities are now essentially picked behind closed doors. The members now rubber-stamp the pick. The upshot? They want their authority back.
Meanwhile, is it any wonder the two picks since – France 2030 and Brisbane 2032 – are facing considerable governance and logistics issues?
For years, no one at the IOC has seemingly been permitted to voice public dissent. The annual assemblies, which are called “sessions,” are now tightly scripted, evoking nothing so much as the manner of a Politburo meeting.
In an interview a few days ago with Agence France-Presse, Samaranch Jr., an IOC vice president, came as close as anyone on the inside to offering public criticism (“erosion of trust”) of Bach’s leadership style, saying the “crisis years” of the pandemic drove Bach to rely on a “‘war chamber’ with … the [IOC] administration.”
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Seen through this prism – an erosion of trust in a changing world – it’s obvious why three key sponsors left after Paris.
If the Paris Games were such a whopping success, one would expect corporate entities would be racing to sign on the dotted line — to be part of the excitement. Instead, seen through this lens, it’s clear why the IOC has in the six months since Paris ended brought in exactly one new high-level sponsor, and that just days ago, a Chinese electronics brand, TCL.
Why, even with new ways of counting eyeballs on more screens, NBC’s numbers for Paris – 30.6 million across the combined live prime and U.S. primetime viewing periods – still comes up less than the 31 million it got for London in 2012, 12 years before.
Why any number of organizations in the Olympic ecosystem – not just World Rugby – are hurting.
Though the IOC has said it intends to give the Summer Games sports federations more after Paris, they have had to contend with the same dole for the last two four-year periods.
Organizing committees have significant sums of money withheld by the IOC, which is believed to go into its nebulous “Global Retention Fund.” You can find the fund's existence if you read the Host City Contract closely. The IOC says, time and again, it spends only 10% of what it takes in on administration. It has been suggested this fund may be a sly way of getting around that. Is it?
Is the current IOC administration, focused on centralizing authority, keen on alternative voices in sport?
The IOC banished the International Boxing Association to the Olympic wilderness. The IOC took over the boxing tournament at the Paris Games. It then oversaw a process by which two boxers were allowed to compete in the female category though they had been tested amid the IBA 2023 women’s world championships and those tests showed, according to lab results, markers for XY chromosomes and ‘male’ karyotypes. It’s reasonable to advance the argument that the IOC’s message from Paris to everyone watching as these two boxers won gold medals: invalidate your eyes and lived experience. See “erosion of trust.”
The IOC went to lengths to sideline Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, former head of the Olympic Council of Asia. The industry group GAISF was dissolved; UNESCO was told to stop stepping on the IOC’s toes and drop its Fit for Life programme; the IOC has taken over the Global Alliance for the Promotion of Physical Activity, and the IOC has been trying to silence the World Olympians Association since the WOA pointed out that the IOC’s initial position on Russian and Belorussian athletes after the invasion of Ukraine was against the Olympic Charter.
Until a new president changes course, the IOC would seem likely to try to grab what it can from those around it – even stooping so low as to try to take an Olympian’s post-nominal letters OLY away from the Olympians organization, the WOA. As it did with GAISF, the IOC tried to get the WOA members to dissolve the organisation so that it could take their assets. The WOA members voted no, and then the IOC tried to trademark OLY Olympian and other WOA assets.
The WOA and its assets are small potatoes compared to what the IOC takes or withholds from the OCOGs, the IFs, NOCs, NGOs, and others. But every little bit helps keep the lights on at Olympic House and the champagne flowing at Lausanne Palace.
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As we head into the second quarter of the 21st century, it’s worth noting first that, of course, most Olympians must raise money to train and compete. Then, especially given that $13 billion is secured, the obvious follow-up is why the IOC doesn’t give them a living wage, health insurance, and a pension like other professional sports do.
Make no mistake: the athletes competing at the Games are professionals. The amateur days are long, long gone.
Without the athletes, there would be no IOC and no Olympic Games. Olympians can’t readily use footage of themselves competing at the Games. By rights, who should that belong to?
In Canada, speed skating gold medalist Isabelle Weidemann, a flag bearer at the 2022 Winter Games, told the CBC, “To think we struggle to buy groceries, struggle to maintain equipment or purchase training necessities, all these expenses just to be able to compete with the rest of the world — there’s such a discrepancy there.”
Discrepancy? Why does the IOC not detail the salaries and compensation of its directors in its annual reports? Is it trying to hide something (“erosion of trust”)? The information is readily available if you know that as a U.S. tax-exempt organization, the IOC must file an Internal Revenue Service Form 990 yearly. The website ProPublica lays it all out in easy-to-understand charts. In 2023, the most recent year available, three top officials made more than $1 million. Two, more than $500,000. A dozen, more than $400,000. Four, more than $300,000.
The annual report notes that the salaries and short-term benefits of “executive management” totaled $15.41 million in 2023, up from $13.7 million in 2022.
This is why the disconnect.
The way out, the way to connect, to restore and engender trust, as Gurri notes, is a return to two simple virtues: honesty and humility:
“Truth must be spoken even when it hurts the speaker or the audience …
“So,” he writes, “I would borrow one more virtue from The Wizard of Oz: courage.”