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Thomas Bach’s tenure as International Olympic Committee President is almost at an end, and a new leader of the Olympic movement will be chosen by the IOC membership on March 20. Seven candidates have thrown their hats into the Olympic ring hoping to become President of what has been described as one of the world’s most exclusive clubs, but with three weeks before the 109 IOC members assemble to vote, a true frontrunner has yet to emerge from the peloton.
Paris shimmered during the glamorous opening ceremony of the Games of the XXXIIIrd Olympiad on July … [+] 26, 2024. With the election of a new IOC President later this month, the Olympic movement will have a new leader. (Photo by François-Xavier Marit-Pool/Getty Images)
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The race is between His Royal Highness Prince Feisal al Hussein of Jordan, Sebastian Coe of Great Britain, Kirsty Coventry of Zimbabwe, Johan Eliasch of Great Britain, David Lappartient of France, Juan Antonio Samaranch of Spain, and Morinari Watanabe of Japan, and the winner will become the front person of the billion-dollar organization that controls one of the world’s most watched sporting events. The next IOC President will oversee the delivery of the Olympic Summer and Winter Games between now and at least 2032, while also serving in an unofficial sense as sports’s top diplomat in an increasingly contentious world.
The seven contenders are a study of power and influence in the intersecting worlds of international sport and business, with a splash of royalty thrown in too. Al-Hussein is the younger brother of King Abdullah of Jordan. Samaranch is an IOC Vice President whose father guided the organization between 1980 and 2001. Coe, Eliasch, Lappartient, and Watanabe all currently head governing bodies of different Olympic sports, and all four have backgrounds in business, politics, or both. Coe, a former middle distance runner, and Coventry, a retired elite swimmer, are both Olympic gold medallists in their own right. All have professed their heartfelt commitment to leading the IOC and the Olympic movement forward, though naturally they differ in how exactly to go about that.
The election will take place on March 20 during the IOC session at Costa Navarino in Greece amidst a spectacular stretch of luxury resorts in the Peloponnese bordering the idyllic blue waters of the Mediterranean. Fittingly, the session will commence with an opening ceremony at Olympia, which hosted the ancient Olympics for nearly four centuries and remains the spiritual home of the Games. The IOC membership — including several high-profile sports legends and one Academy Award-winning actress — will determine who succeeds Bach, likely over multiple rounds of voting.
IOC Presidential candidates are not allowed to campaign for office in the traditional sense. This election is not about lawn signs and campaign rallies; instead, each candidate prepared a manifesto setting out who they are and what they aspire to do that was published on the IOC website in December. All seven convened in Lausanne, Switzerland, in January to make a 15-minute pitch directly to the IOC voting membership, then had 10 minutes to expand on their platforms and answer questions from reporters.
Since then, campaigning has been a behind-closed-doors affair, with candidates making the rounds at the Asian Winter Games in Harbin, China last month as well as at the European Olympic Committee’s general assembly in Frankfurt this week. Whoever emerges as the winner will have convinced voters that they are the best fit to deal with the issues on the IOC’s doorstep and others looming on the horizon.
Thomas Bach, a 1976 Olympic gold medalist in fencing, has led the International Olympic Committee … [+] since 2013. IOC Presidents serve an eight-year mandate with the possibility of an additional four year term. (Photo by George Mattock/Getty Images)
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The new IOC President will inherit a changed landscape from what Bach stepped into when he took over from Jacques Rogge 12 years ago. Bach has spent a good deal of his mandate modernizing the Olympic movement; his Olympic Agenda 2020 did away with some of the IOC’s stuffier traditions and paved the way for the Games to include trendy urban sports like BMX and breaking. One of his most enduring legacies is likely to be The Olympic Channel, the digital platform that makes Games content available 24/7, fanning the flames of interest and excitement around the Olympics even when the next one is years away.
Whoever wins the vote will also be responsible for assuring the organization’s legacy beyond 2032, when several of the IOC’s major broadcast deals are set to expire. Negotiating new deals that take into account increased demand for coverage and the plethora of digital and streaming options available will be a top priority. Rethinking the tiered way Olympic sponsorships are presently structured — particularly in light of the departure of three major sponsors last year — and how AI is used may also be a key items on the agenda. Climate change, of particular concern to the Winter Olympics, and sustainability will remain large issues. And unlike for most of the IOC’s history, the Summer and Winter Games are not the only events it has to manage. The Olympics’s expanding portfolio now includes the Youth Olympic Games, the brainchild of Rogge, and the recently announced Olympic Esports Games, whose inaugural edition will take place in Saudi Arabia in 2027.
One thing the new President will not have to worry about in the near future? Finding someone to host the next several editions. The Olympics are booked out until 2036, with Milan and Dolomite resort Cortina D’Ampezzo jointly hosting next year’s Winter Games before the spotlight shifts to Los Angeles and the Summer Games in 2028. The French Alps will play host in 2030, with Brisbane, Australia and Salt Lake City welcoming them in 2032 and 2034.
The new president will become only the tenth person to lead the IOC in its 131-year existence. So far all have been men, and eight of the nine — with the exception of American Avery Brundage — have hailed from Europe. Whether or not they vote for a candidate of their continent, Europeans have a big say in the outcome of the election. Of the 109 IOC members eligible to vote, more than 40 are from European countries, making it the largest voting block ahead of Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania.
Like their predecessors, the seven hopefuls will strive to uphold the historic Olympic motto of faster, higher, stronger. But not together — like any other Olympic contest, only one can emerge as the victor.
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