The International Olympic Committee under president Thomas Bach has sought to work closely with the United Nations. Particularly when it comes to the rights and roles of women and girls.
So it was all the more noteworthy that the UN’s “Special Rapporteur” for, among other matters, women in sports took a plain shot Tuesday at the IOC for the controversy that erupted at the Paris Games in women’s boxing.
News alert: the Games famously were in LA in 1932 and 1984 and will be back in 2028. If you think Paris was the best ever, and it’s right up there with London, with the proviso that all Games have backstage glitches, and on TV you lived none of that, none of the Olympic Village food drama, the COVID cases or, anywhere, the signage that would send you on trips to nowhere — LA formally now has next.
To be clear, the bar is set high, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach calling these Games, which came Sunday to a close, a “love story.”
PARIS – As most everyone knows, George Washington is the first president of the United States of America.
One of the stories American schoolkids learn about Washington is how he decided to stop being president at the end of his second four-year term. The new country had broken away from Britain. There they had a king. The king is king until he dies. In this new country, Washington said, things were going to be different.
In 21st century jargon, we would call what Washington did an expression of best practices and world-class governance.
Speaking Saturday before the fuil membership of the International Olympic Committee, president Thomas Bach, nearing the end of his second term, pulled a George Washington. He said he would step down next year, at the end of his mandated 12 years.
PARIS – In a unanimous decision, Algeria’s Imane Khelif defeated China’s Liu Yang Friday night at Roland Garros Stadium to win women’s Olympic under-66 kilogram boxing gold, a seemingly inevitable turn in the controversy that has shaken the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
The issue is not, as IOC president Thomas Bach sought to depict it Friday – who is a woman?
Rather, it’s what rules does a sport seek to apply in deciding who gets to compete in the women’s category?
Those are two different things.
PARIS – The athlete who has ignited a worldwide controversy in Olympic women’s boxing was disqualified from the 2023 International Boxing Assn. world championships in New Delhi after two tests, one in India amid that tournament and a prior test in Turkey in May 2022, “concluded the boxer’s DNA was that of a male consisting of XY chromosomes,” according to correspondence the IBA sent in June 2023 – more than a year ago – to the International Olympic Committee.
The June 5, 2023, letter, spotlighting Algeria’s Imane Khelif, reads, “This situation epitomizes the importance of protecting safe sport, and the integrity of sport in which the Olympic Movement is jointly committed to.”
3 Wire Sports has seen the letter and the tests.
The national Olympic committee of Yemen's annual budget is about $370,000, all of which comes from outside the country, mostly from the International Olympic Committee. That money supports 16 sports and feeds a staff of 21. Each lives on roughly $200 per month. There is no government funding. “They don’t have the budget anymore,” the secretary general of the Olympic committee, Mohammed Al-Ahjeri, 66, said here Tuesday.
This, though, is not a story about pity for Yemen. Far from it.
This is a story about the true meaning of the Olympics.
What it means, ultimately, to “win.”
PARIS – Here in France they have a saying for the thing that transpired as Salt Lake City won the right to the 2034 Winter Games, delivered amid an International Olympic Committee thrashing of the IOC’s favorite dog to beat, the United States of America.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The more things change, Uncle Sam, the more they stay the same.
The IOC gave Salt Lake 2034 because it had to. It needs American money. The U.S. television rights deal expires in 2032.
Holy hell, but Thomas Bach really is out to get Seb Coe.
Anywhere and everywhere you go in Olympic circles these days, it’s the talk, and what transpired Friday – calling 911, Bach all but sticking a figurative knife into Coe in broad daylight, anointing Hugh Robertson, head of the British Olympic Association, an individual IOC member – was just the latest as the wheel of IOC presidential succession politics turns.
For months, Bach has sought to downplay the what-comes-next phase for International Olympic Committee leadership. His term, in theory, ends in June 2025. An election is purportedly set for sometime next year. If there is an election.
A few weeks back came the announcement of the Friendship Games, to be held in Russia in September. Total prize money across all sports: $100 million. Winners get $40,000. Second place, $25,000. Third: $17,000.
On Wednesday, World Athletics, the No. 1 sport in the Olympic landscape, made a precedent-setting move, announcing it would pay gold medalists at the Paris Games. Total prize money: $2.4 million. Winners across each of the four dozen track and field events will receive $50,000 each. Relay teams will split the $50k. Starting in Los Angeles in 2028, silver and bronze medalists will also be paid.
The timing may seem like World Athletics is following the Russians. To be clear, very clear: it is not.
“I have to accept the world has changed,” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said Wednesday in an interview with Steve Scott at ITV.
Four months ago, in the first week of December 2023, I wrote that the Paris 2024 opening ceremony needed a Plan B.
Since then, I have had dozens of conversations with people inside and outside the Olympic movement. No one has said the idea of a flotilla of boats, the athletes of the world floating down the River Seine for six kilometers, or three-plus miles, is good. Almost everyone has said the same thing about this idea: it’s flawed.
For the sake of all that is decent in our world, the hope here is that they pull it off. But it so obviously seems the farthest thing from safe.
