IOC President Thomas Bach Optimistic For Olympics In “New World Order”

From his office at International Olympic Committee headquarters on the calm blue shores of Lake Geneva, IOC President Thomas Bach predicts a serene future for the Olympics, even as the world thrums with change.

In a rare interview with the Associated Press this week, the outgoing IOC President did acknowledge that the future might not be as placid as the lake that separates the Olympic capital of Lausanne, Switzerland, from Evian, France. “We have a new world order in the making, and this making…will not happen without rumbling,” Bach said.

Ever the diplomat, Bach did not mention any specific world leader or upheaval as the source of such reverberations. Nor did he feel that world events will cast a negative spotlight on any upcoming editions of the Games.

Regarding Los Angeles 2028, “I am also convinced that President Trump and his administration will fully support the Olympic Games,” Bach told AP reporter Graham Dunbar. “He likes sport, so there I don’t see a risk.” He also dodged a question about how the IOC would feel if one of Elon Musk’s companies expressed interest in becoming an Olympic sponsor.

“From what I see he is interested in other things than to think about,” said Bach, who won a gold medal in fencing with his German team at the Montreal Games in 1976. “I did not study this kind of question.”

The Olympics have long been more than a sports showcase for host nations, who have been aware that the world is watching them too amidst myriad athletic events. Countries have traditionally taken the Games as an opportunity to put the best of themselves forward, using well-known faces — supermodel Gisele Bundchen walking a runway in the Maracana Stadium during the Opening Ceremony in Rio or Tom Cruise kickstarting Los Angeles hype machine during the Closing Ceremony in Paris — or landmarks (Eiffel Tower, anyone?) to impress telespectators that number into the billions.

Bach doesn’t see any of that changing, especially when it comes to the next Summer Games in Los Angeles in three years time. The American people, he opined, “appreciate and love that the Games are about sport but they are about more than sport. They will want to welcome the athletes from all over the world.”

The changing Olympics

In his 12 years as IOC President, Bach has presided over a good deal of change within the organization that controls the Olympics. During his term, the IOC has implemented a set of sweeping reforms that have brought the Games close to gender parity, reshaped how cities bid to host, oversaw the creation of a refugee Olympic team for displaced athletes, and created an over-the-top digital platform that makes Games content accessible to anyone anywhere.

Measured with any yardstick, it is a formidable set of accomplishments. Perhaps most importantly for the Olympics, it knows where it’s going to land, at least for the next decade. Bach’s policies have led the next four editions of the Summer and Winter Games to be attributed to Milan-Cortina, Los Angeles, the French Alps, Brisbane, and Salt Lake City, respectively.

Who will lead the IOC during those events still seems like an open question. Seven candidates — HRH 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 — have all officially declared their candidacy for the job. The 110 people holding IOC membership will elect one of them as the organization’s new President on March 20.

Bach himself has observed strict neutrality regarding the campaign to succeed him, though rumors have coursed through Lausanne that he favors Coventry, a seven-time Olympic medallist in swimming and the first woman ever to run for the job.

In a Q and A with reporters at the IOC headquarters on January 30, Coventry, 41, demurred when asked about the speculation that Bach preferred her for the post. “We all have a very good relationship with him and I think he is being very fair to all of us,” she said, adding that as fellow athletes, she and Bach “share a lot of commonalities, a lot of common philosophies.”

Though he has a right to cast a ballot for a successor, Bach has indicated that he will abstain from the vote. The 71-year-old will remain in office through a three-month transition period before handing off the reins to the new President on Olympic Day on June 23.

“Our autonomy is not negotiable”

If Bach is relatively sanguine about the potential challenges of a changing world, his potential successors seem more vigilant, with several underlining the IOC’s need for a firm guiding hand, particularly if it is to maintain its longstanding neutrality.

“One of the challenges will be the instability of the world,” said Lappartient, who helped steer the French Alps’s bid for the 2030 Winter Games. “It’s becoming more and more difficult and sure we’ll have some crises to face in the future. This is why we need strong leadership.”

Were he to meet with Trump as IOC President, Lappartient indicated that he would use the occasion in part to remind him “that our autonomy is not negotiable,” he said. “Autonomy and also political neutrality.”

Throughout his Presidency, Bach has been fond of saying “Change or be changed,” which he has evoked on numerous occasions when introducing new initiatives. As a philosophy, it’s far from the Olympic motto “Faster, Higher, Stronger — Together,” the last word added amidst the during the pandemic to underline, as Bach put it, that mankind achieves nothing if it cannot put aside its differences and unify as one.

Yet Bach bridged the two. ​​”We can only go faster, we can only aim higher, we can only become stronger by standing together,” he said when the motto’s addition was implemented in 2021. Both sayings are likely to be important to the next IOC President as he or she prepares for future Olympics, no matter what the state of the world or the challenges — far off still but rumbling in the distance — may be.