The closed-door battle to lead the Olympics

Late Wednesday, members of the International Olympic Committee gathered for a dinner at the Olympic Museum on the banks of Lake Geneva. The next morning, they would see presentations from seven candidates vying to be their leader, a role that would by most measures be the most important in international sports.

At the closed-doors gathering, the outgoing president, Thomas Bach, ensured that the members present — the people who determine who will eventually lead the IOC — were kept apart from the candidates. It was, he said perhaps jokingly, so they could enjoy their meals in peace.

It was a scene in keeping with the quirky and sometimes stifling rules of an election that will be decided when IOC members vote in March at a resort in southern Greece.

The winner will assume leadership of the organization that controls the Olympics, an event that is as prestigious as it is expensive, and a diplomatic status higher than any other figure in the sports world. But many of the candidates have been critical of the thicket of rules and regulations surrounding the election that they say have hindered their ability to get their message across not only to IOC members but also the wider world.

Candidates are barred from holding debates, voicing opposition regarding a rival’s vision for the IOC or even receiving public endorsements from members.

“What we are looking at as candidates is to become the president of the largest sports movement in the world, and I think, in fairness, transparency and integrity, the world has a right to know who is running and what they stand for,” Prince Faisal bin Al Hussein, one of the candidates, said, in a strikingly direct statement in the protocol-heavy world of the 130-year-old organization.

The institution draws its members from the world of sports and beyond, with federation heads rubbing shoulders with leaders from commerce, politics, show business and — like in the case of Prince Faisal — global royalty. Princess Anne, the younger sister of England’s King Charles III, heads the nominations committee for what has been described as the most exclusive club in the world. There are currently 110 members.

Prince Faisal is the only bona fide royal among the seven candidates vying for the presidency. But he’s joined by what counts as IOC aristocracy in the form of Spanish businessperson Juan Antonio Samaranch, whose father led the organization for two decades through 2001 and shaped much of what it has become. Also running are four leaders of sports federations, including Sebastian Coe, the gold medal-winning Olympic runner-turned-head of international track and field. There is also Kirsty Coventry, an Olympic champion swimmer from Zimbabwe, who would be the first woman and the first person from Africa to lead the IOC.

For such a consequential election, much of it is taking place in the dark, away from any form of public or private debate.

The morning after the dinner at the museum, the candidates — all staying at the luxury Lausanne Palace, the longtime haunt of the IOC, which has a suite named for the elder Samaranch — were taken in black Mercedes minivans to the organization’s headquarters at intervals corresponding with the order in which they were to deliver 15-minute presentations. It was the first and only opportunity for them to speak to the entire membership. Officials had to hand over their cellphones, recordings were not permitted and members were not allowed to ask questions.

The scene and the secrecy prompted more than one official to fume at the process being more akin to a papal conclave, when the selection of a new pope after a secret vote by a gathering of cardinals is confirmed with white smoke emanating from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel.

After presenting his vision to the members who, like the Catholic cardinals, will vote in secret, Samaranch said in an interview that he would have loved to have had a recording of his speech. After all, he said, it was “the speech of my life.”

Still, sitting in a room bearing not only his father’s name but also a large portrait of him, Samaranch, a member of the IOC’s top board since 2012, said he had not taken the time to challenge the rules of the election, most of which, he said, he disagreed with.

Under the regulations, contact time with voters is severely limited. In-person meetings, beyond the two days in Lausanne, are tightly controlled, with strict requirements to give advanced notice of any such contact to the IOC’s ethics body. Phone calls are allowed.

“Nonsense,” said Morinari Watanabe, a long-shot candidate from Japan who leads global gymnastics, as the members were chauffeured away after the presentations. The next time they will all be together is on the eve of the vote.

Watanabe’s ideas include turning the Olympic Games into a 24-hour enterprise across five continents and renaming the IOC. Those are revolutionary thoughts for an organization whose approach to change can be glacial compared with the corporate world.

“The Olympic movement is a powerful movement,” said Coe, easily the most recognizable of the candidates beyond the clubby world of sports politics. “It should be the thought leadership in sport; it should be setting the tone and style; and, my goodness, there is nothing like the Olympic Games.”

The winner will control an organization that generates almost $8 billion per four-year Olympic cycle. But perhaps more important, the role is considered the top diplomat in sports, a bridge in an increasingly fractious world, with a prize in the Summer Olympics for which great powers vie. Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader, was the first to call Thomas Bach after his election in 2013.

Most members refused to offer any insight into whom they were thinking of voting for or even basic questions about what characteristics they would like to see in a candidate. Luis Mejia Oviedo, a delegate from the Dominican Republic, sitting in the oak-trimmed lobby of the Lausanne Palace, only smiled and offered a handshake as a response to each of three questions about the election.

Syed Shahid Ali, a Pakistani who has been an IOC member for almost 30 years, said debate within the movement had slowly eroded, giving members little say in crucial decisions. That has been a regular critique of the organization under Bach, a former German fencer.

“The IOC is an autonomous body but quite private in one sense,” Ali said as he watched an attendant open a door for Prince Albert II of Monaco to enter a chauffeur-driven Lexus and make his departure. “It controls world sport, so from that sense it’s not all that private. But from the inner workings of how it functions — that is quite private.”

Many of the candidates, including Samaranch and Coventry, are established members of the IOC’s top board and have vowed to give members a greater voice again. That includes having a say in the organization’s most important choice: where the Olympics will take place. Under Bach, that choice has largely been taken away, with the members evaluating just one preferred candidate put forward by the IOC leadership.

“They should have said it much earlier,” Ali said. “It shows lack of courage of convictions or the fact it might be an afterthought or it might be that it’s only applicable now you’re a candidate.”

With a largely inscrutable and diverse electorate, forecasting front-runners is a tricky task. There has been speculation that Coventry, who recently became a mother for the second time, has the backing of the incumbent Bach. “I think he’s being very fair to all of us,” Coventry told a news conference capped at 10 minutes per candidate after their pitches. “I don’t feel that he is out campaigning for me.”

For the winner, there will be a bulging to-do list, with a notable focus on the United States, where the biggest television contract requires updating after a decade; the national anti-doping agency is in the midst of an increasingly acrimonious war with the global anti-doping regulator; and the next Summer Olympics — in Los Angeles in 2028 — is being planned under a mercurial Trump administration.

“These are big challenges; they’ll be in my in-tray if I am successful,” Coe said.

With votes to be secured, candidates now face a race against time to press their case. Samaranch hoped to gather a few stragglers before they left for their homes, businesses and palaces around the world. Smiling and making a lassolike gesture, he hoped to gather as many as he could for dinner.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times
© 2025 The New York Times Company