IOC Empire threatens World Olympians with Death Star – hardy band bucks control | 3 Wire Sports

It is sometimes said a Games is the most complex event undertaken in peacetime. Making it all work requires some level of control.

When it frames the Bach presidency, the enduring question for history is — how much control?

An IOC assembly is called a “session.” The Samaranch years saw sessions at which the members engaged in sometimes fractious debate. Not so during the Bach era. Comments from the members are seemingly scripted in advance.

For that matter, the members have had any real role taken away — the one matter they could control, selecting the site of the next edition of the Games, has been largely shifted to a commission that, behind closed doors, evaluates a bid’s merits in the manner of a business deal.

Two years ago, an entity serving all the international sports federations — it was called GAISF — was dissolved and transferred to a restructured SportAccord. 

The IOC has not hesitated to sideline personalities, even those who had played a leading role, key among them Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah of Kuwait. The full tale of how he was ousted, particularly from his senior position at the Olympic Council of Asia, has yet to be told. 

Umar Kremlev, the Russian president of the International Boxing Assn., got sideways with Bach. In 2023, the IOC banished the IBA to the Olympic wilderness — out. 

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The Paris Games were designed to jump-start matters all but stalled by the pandemic-driven Games in Beijing and Tokyo. How? Pretty backdrops on television. Paris delivered. How could it not? Paris is Paris, after all.

What has yet to be delivered is a full reckoning of how much the Paris Games cost — odds are significant the number will not be in line with what organizers promised in 2017, when Paris was awarded the Games, nor the Agenda 2020 so-called reforms. 

In recent months, three of the IOC’s top-tier sponsors have announced they are leaving — Panasonic, Bridgestone and Toyota. 

The TOP Program, as it is called, is a key financial source for many national Olympic committees. 

Meantime, Lenovo had once been a TOP sponsor. The IOC was said to be courting Lenovo anew. In October came word Lenovo would instead be a top-level sponsor for the 2026 FIFA men’s World Cup centered in the United States and the 2027 FIFA women’s World Cup in Brazil. 

A look at the TOP list underscores another profound evolution: an increasing number of companies offer not goods but services. Common sense: the IOC has to ensure those companies that provide services can, in part, sell those services within the so-called “Olympic family” to help earn their money back. That means the IOC needs to persuade NOCs, federations or others to use those services. 

Toyota is in the car business.

Deloitte? Intel? Allianz? Alibaba? Atos? 

Losing three such sponsors is, there’s no way to spin it, not positive.

“I’ve wondered for a while now whether the event is truly putting athletes first,” Toyota chairman Aki Toyoda said in a podcast on the firm’s YouTube channel, announcing the end of the sponsorship, which began in 2015.

He added of the Olympic scene, “It is also becoming increasingly political.”

Political? Back to that Oct. 19 IOC letter, which surfaced at the pentathlon federation elections, according to the Nov. 14 WOA letter. Someone who knows says the IOC leaked it in a bid to discredit Bouzou, who was running for the pentathlon presidency. He did not win — he was knocked out in the first round.

Political? For two-plus years, amid considerable furor, the Russia-Ukraine issue proved central to the IOC’s planning for Paris. Upshot: only a few athletes from Russia or Belarus would end up competing, as “neutrals.”

Meantime, the IOC hailed Paris 2024 as #GenderEqualOlympics — the first Games to see more or less the same number of female athletes as males, what it called its “commitment to gender equality.”

Then, the women’s boxing competition called that commitment into question in a controversy that proved, above all, intensely political — and brought into focus the question of what athletes the IOC was putting first, and on what grounds.

With the IBA out, the IOC ran the event, and it was marked by controversy over two athletes who, the IBA had told the IOC in June 2023, had tested positive for XY chromosomes. That is, male karyotype markers. Both would win gold medals. If the IBA had been in charge, neither would have been in the draw. The IOC’s key eligibility rule: a passport saying ‘female.’ 

In October, a UN special rapporteur — the IOC has worked all the more closely with the UN during the Bach years, another political move — asserted in a report that the entire thing could have been avoided, and easily, because the “International Olympic Committee refused to carry out a sex screening.”

She went on: “Current technology enables a reliable sex screening procedure through a simple cheek swab that ensures non-invasiveness, confidentiality and dignity.”

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If the IOC were to hire a consultant to review its operations — surely it knows where to find one — would the executive summary perhaps read something like this?

– Data, social media image and B-to-C driving business element

– Optimized reengineering needs openness and collaboration, not insularity and other factors

Indeed, with the presidential campaign swinging into gear, the IOC is at an inflection point.

This is precisely why it’s all the more telling the IOC finds itself in this situation with the WOA.

The WOA is an independent entity. Samaranch gave it his blessing — for it to be independent — in the 1990s. In IOC jargon, it is a “recognized organization” with a licensing agreement to use the five rings.  

What does the $1 million the IOC gives the WOA each year go for? 

The CEO salary; development officers based on various continents rather than, say, in Lausanne; grants to Olympians seeking funds for service programs; and access to services that include an email address, olympian.org, free to Olympians.

Could the WOA find a replacement funding source? Cities, countries and businesses surely would express interest.

Could it do without the rings — substitute, say, a flame or some other symbol? That has been up for debate, but probably.

Arguably, the WOA’s No. 1 asset, meantime, has been to offer any Olympian who signs up for it the post-nominal ‘OLY’ — like having ‘Ph.D.’ or ‘M.D.’ More than 22,000 have done so. 

With 22,000 people, you have a list. Rather, a database.

Hypothetically speaking — when you are a multinational company in the service business, gaining database access is kinda like the corporate version of winning a gold medal, right?