Thomas Bach’s powers as IOC President want to be extended

The elections of the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which will take place in 2025, have acquired additional intrigue thanks to the emergence of an initiative to extend the expiring mandate of the current head of the structure, Thomas Bach, contrary to the existing regulations. To do this, both the IOC members and Mr. Bach himself, who recently, in fact, had no opponents and enjoyed almost one hundred percent support from his colleagues, will have to agree to change the clause of the Olympic Charter that limits the maximum term of office as president to 12 years, introduced on the initiative of the predecessor of the German functionary Jacques Rogge.

The most high-profile event of the session of the International Olympic Committee in Mumbai was the initiative presented at it by the President of the Association of National Olympic Committees of Africa, Algerian Mustafa Beraf. It is directly related to the IOC presidential elections, which will take place in 2025. Until now, there was no doubt that the parent sports structure would have a new chapter. According to the Olympic Charter, the main document of the IOC, the maximum term of a presidential mandate is 12 years, and the current incumbent, Thomas Bach, was first elected in 2013.

Mustafa Beraf, however, proposed extending Mr. Bach’s mandate. Formally, only two session delegates from the Dominican Republic and Djibouti have so far joined his initiative – Luis Mejia Oviedo and Aisha Garad Ali. But Insidethegames has no doubt that we are talking about the start of a campaign and the emergence of an entire movement with the goal of leaving the presidency to Thomas Bach.

This news adds intrigue to the 2025 elections, which was already in abundance before it. A rare case, but given that there is not much time left before them, it is still unclear who is going to claim the right to head the IOC. Only one well-known functionary has spoken publicly about plans to run: World Athletics President Sebastian Coe. In addition to the Briton, various sources name several more names of those who may have presidential ambitions. These are, for example, the Japanese leader of the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG), Morinari Watanabe, the Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., the son of perhaps the most popular head of the IOC of all time, as well as the once enormously influential Kuwaiti sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah , who, however, lost all sports positions, including the position of president of the Olympic Council of Asia, due to a corruption scandal and is now fighting with the IOC in courts and arbitrations. The situation is so vague that you can’t name anyone who even remotely resembles the future election favorite.

At the same time, at the turn of the last and current decades, the IOC turned into a structure with exceptional centralization, in which the leader is the indisputable authority. This is evidenced at least by the results of the previous presidential elections. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, they were held online, and Thomas Bach received 93 out of 94 votes. Recently, there have been no signs of his losing his authority within the IOC, even despite the inclusion of such a complex and sensitive issue as sanctions against Russian athletes, which obviously does not have a solution that suits everyone.

Meanwhile, everything that happened in Mumbai immediately after Mustafa Beraf came up with his unexpected initiative spoke in favor of the version that it has a chance of becoming a reality. For example, the vice-president of the IOC and the head of its legal commission, John Coates, reacting to her, simply calmly explained the technical side of the process. He informed that changes to the Olympic Charter require the submission of a corresponding proposal in writing no later than 30 days before the IOC session (the next one will precede the Paris Olympics in the summer of 2024) for its assessment by the executive committee. And Morinari Watanabe, that is, a potential candidate, considered it necessary to express “love” for Mr. Bach.

And Thomas Bach himself, who turns 70 in December, was outwardly quite receptive to the attempt to re-elect him again. In any case, he did not make it clear that he was inclined to reject the initiative; on the contrary, he thanked the session participants for the “kind words of support,” directed, in his words, not so much “at him personally, but at all of us.” Only the next day, answering journalists’ questions about the initiative, he noted that presidential term limits were “necessary” in any case, again without specifying what exactly they were.

In the history of the IOC, there is already a precedent for amending the Olympic Charter in order for the current president to retain his status. The adjustment took place at the Budapest session in 1995. At that time, the validity of the presidential mandate was limited by the maximum age of its holder established by regulations – 75 years. At the proposal of the President of the International Football Federation (FIFA), Joao Havelange, the ceiling was raised to 80 years. This made it possible to extend the term of office of Juan Antonio Samaranch, during which the IOC, which had survived a number of crises, was transformed into a prosperous organization in all senses, including financial.

Mr. Samaranch retired after his mandate expired amid the first major corruption crisis that shook his structure: it was associated with the fight for the 2002 Winter Olympics, which went to Salt Lake City. And six months before her, the Belgian Jacques Rogge was chosen as the Spaniard’s successor, in whose track record a radical reform, aimed precisely at countering corruption, democratization and increasing the transparency of the IOC, occupies a prominent place. Among its most important points was the limitation of the duration of the presidential post to 12 years, which ensures the necessary, in Mr. Rogge’s opinion, personnel rotation not at the top of the hierarchy. Thomas Bach in Mumbai might not have mentioned that he took an active part in the development of amendments to the regulations. Everyone interested in the Olympic movement was already well aware that since the 2000s, as vice-president of the IOC, he was actually the right hand of Jacques Rogge and without his blessing he would hardly have been able to even dream of the outstanding career leap of ten years ago.

Alexey Dospehov