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Lord Coe is hoping to be named the tenth president of the IOC - Getty Images/Fabrice Coffrini
If you were looking to avoid uncomfortable scrutiny, you could hardly choose a better location than Costa Navarino, this clifftop nirvana in the southwest Peloponnese. With its sprawling villas and 131 infinity pools, it is a fitting backdrop for the International Olympic Committee’s absurdly secretive presidential election, a ritual where opulence is prized over openness. It feels as if the set of White Lotus has been chosen for a Vatican conclave.’
Just ask Dick Pound, longstanding IOC member and former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency. “It makes the Vatican look like it’s open house,” he says. And he is the election scrutineer. Throughout a maddeningly opaque rigmarole, the seven candidates have been barred from publishing campaign videos, arranging public meetings or taking part in public debates. Now begins the wait for the white smoke. All that will be publicly seen, at around 3pm GMT on Thursday, is outgoing leader Thomas Bach turning over a piece of paper bearing the name of the president-elect. Members will have their phones and tablets stored until the moment of revelation.
Even Lord Coe, in the midst of frantic late lobbying to become only the 10th leader in the IOC’s 131-year history, could not conceal his frustration at the cloak-and-dagger pantomime of it all. “It has been difficult to engage,” he said. “In future, this needs to be a more expansive process.” For now, Thomas Bach, the aloof autocrat who since 2013 has used this job to act as grandly as a head of state, is revelling in one last exotic corporate away day. During this session’s opening ceremony at ancient Olympia, he and his loyalists in the front row were treated to a performance by the Athens Philharmonic and a Hellenic dance troupe’s version of Zorba the Greek.
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The IOC’s 106 delegates constitute the world’s most exclusive private members’ club. Just cast your eye down the list: Princess Nora of Lichtenstein, Prince Albert of Monaco, the Grand Duke of Luxembourg. Oh, and Michelle Yeoh, the Oscar-winning actress whose sporting credentials are, to put it mildly, ambiguous. Trouble is, there is a world of difference between who the powerbrokers here are and who they purport to be. They witter endlessly about being guided by the principle of transparency and yet they refuse even to disclose their salaries.
Fortunately, there are ways of finding out. As a tax-exempt organisation in the United States, the IOC must annually disclose its remuneration structure to the Internal Revenue Service. The top executives’ earnings in 2023, published on the ProPublica website, make for revealing reading. Christophe Dubi, executive director of the Olympic Games: £1.31 million. Christophe De Kepper, director-general: £1.15 million. Lana Haddad, chief operating officer: £782,000. These figures are extraordinary when you consider that so many athletes, the true stars of any Games, still struggle to pay their food bills, lacking any rights to monetise the TV footage of their Olympic feats.
Coe, in his pitch for the top job, talks of wanting to “open the windows”. Nowhere needs a blast of clean air more than this stale, ossified cabal. Be in no doubt: if this were a truly meritocratic contest, with an outcome determined by ability and accomplishment, Coe would win by a mile. Unlike Bach, who advertises his 1976 team gold medal in fencing at every turn, the president of World Athletics is a true Olympic great – a double champion over 1500 metres, perhaps the most globally competitive event of all. He delivered a stunningly successful home Games. He has led the No 1 Olympic sport for a decade, his tenure distinguished by a resolve to keep biological males out of women’s track and field. This is one race that should not be close.
Especially when you examine the pedigree of his opponents. While some insiders put Juan Antonio Samaranch Jnr as a fractional favourite, the 65-year-old Spaniard is the ultimate IOC insider, installed as a member in 2001, His presence as an IOC vice-president originated in the fact that his father, former president Juan Antonio Samaranch – and self-styled “His Excellency”, who once impatiently asked an assistant to cut his breakfast grapefruit into pieces – controversially awarded him a seat at the table as a parting gift. Even some of those inured to his largesse were shocked, with 38 members deciding not to support his son’s elevation.
The younger Samaranch, “Juanito” to his associates, is widely described as the smoothest of operators. It seems unthinkable, though, that an organisation genuinely committed to change would acquiesce in putting two generations of the same family in charge within 25 years. This is a body crying out for reform, not a shameless display of nepotism. Plus, Samaranch Jnr has been assailed over the past 24 hours by concerns, raised with the IOC’s ethics department, that two Chinese members are eligible to vote for him despite sitting on the board of his family foundation. He denied there was any conflict of interest, insisting the situation was “perfectly within the rules”.
One other major threat to Coe comes from Kirsty Coventry, the former Olympic swimming champion from Zimbabwe who, crucially, has Bach’s backing. While the president is not meant to meddle in elections, it appears there are concerted efforts afoot to try to ensure that his preferred successor has the requisite backing. One guaranteed voter has travelled here despite being gravely ill. Although Coventry could be trumpeted as a trailblazer if anointed the first female president, she has not always acted within the IOC as a fierce advocate for women. In contrast to Coe, who promised from the outset to protect the integrity of the female category, she did not mention the issue in her manifesto.
The commitment to uphold fair sport for women has become a vital talking point in this election. Coe’s column this week for Telegraph Sport, in which he reasserted his record on this front, has been endorsed by everybody from Boris Johnson to Daley Thompson. Certainly, he is a far more plausible advocate than either Samaranch or Coventry. If you think they will steer the IOC away from the influence of activists for self-ID in sport, consider this: both of them were on the executive board that let Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting win gold medals in female boxing despite sex tests indicating the presence of male chromosomes. They stood behind Bach’s ridiculous argument that womanhood could be determined by an ‘F’ in someone’s passport.
Coe, after months of pressing the flesh, finally went quiet on the eve of the election. In a short statement on Wednesday night, he said: “I feel there is momentum.” His bid team likened his reticence to Usain Bolt – whose support he has secured – choosing to be silent in the build-up to an Olympic final. You wish the same could be said of his fellow delegates, who offered a sequence of oleaginous homilies to Bach as the German prepared to step down. “May the Olympic gods continue to guide you, dear president,” gushed his deputy, Nicole Hoevertsz. It was a level of unctuousness that would not have looked out of place on the politburo in Pyongyang. Coe might have his faults, but even he would blanch at this cult-like worship. A transformative leader has never been more urgently needed for the most powerful role in sport. And Coe is the one person who fulfils the criteria, with his key rivals fatally flawed.
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