Behind closed doors at a resort in Greece, with the cameras turned off, International Olympic Committee (IOC) members will choose a new president on Thursday at the organization’s 144th session.
The winner among the seven candidates will lead the largest sporting organization in the world beginning in June when president Thomas Bach, who has held the top job since 2013, steps aside.
One of the biggest items on the new president’s to-do list appeared to be checked off earlier this week, when the IOC announced a new U.S. media rights deal with NBC.
The deal, worth $3 billion, will last through at least 2036, when Salt Lake City will host the Winter Olympics. The U.S. rights deal is a major source of revenue for the IOC.
But they’ll have plenty of other issues to tackle, from navigating international diplomacy and conflict, a warming climate, and issues of sport integrity and athlete safety, to making sure the Olympics are accessible to a younger generation more likely to turn to Tik Tok before switching on a TV.
Here’s a preview of what to expect, who’s running, and why Canadians should care:
The candidates
Seven people are vying for the presidency, with many seeing Sebastian Coe, Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr. and Kirsty Coventry as the three frontrunners.
Coe, the World Athletics president, four-time Olympic medallist and London 2012 organizer, has a platform centred around engaging young people, increasing transparency, strengthening the anti-doping system and prioritizing athletes’ physical, financial and mental welfare.
“The biggest challenge faced by the International Olympic Committee is no different and it is not unique from any national Olympic committee, any sporting organization, any club, private or public: it is how do you continue to excite and engage with young people?” Coe told reporters during a brief question-and-answer session with media in January.
“And how do you utilize, optimize, fully, the use of cutting-edge technology?”
Coe raised eyebrows when, ahead of the Summer Olympics in Paris last year, he announced that gold-medal winners in athletics would get a $50,000 US bonus. Some criticized the move as going against the spirit of the Olympics.
Coe said he will prioritize athletes’ “financial well-being” and will make sure “their contributions are rewarded fairly.” He’s also promised to create programs that would see athletes get a piece of “the commercial rewards they help generate.”
Zimbabwe’s Coventry is only the second woman to ever run for the IOC presidency. If elected, she will also be the first president from Africa. As a swimmer, Coventry competed at five Olympic Games, earning seven medals.
Some see her as Bach’s preferred candidate, though Coventry downplayed that when a reporter asked about it in January.
“We all have a very good relationship with him,” she said. “I think he is being very fair to all of us at this point in time.”
She also emphasized transparency and modernization in her platform, and has been open about some of the unique challenges African athletes face. The continent has never hosted an Olympic Games, and Coventry is the most decorated Olympian from Africa.
“We need to find more ways of directly impacting and getting revenue to athletes before they become Olympians,” Coventry told reporters in January.
“In my journey, it was easy to get sponsorship once I’d won a medal. It was getting to that medal that was tough.”
If Samaranch’s name sounds familiar, it’s because his namessake father led the IOC from 1980 to 2001. But a lot has changed since his father’s presidency.
“Bear in mind he joined the Olympic movement more than 60 years ago,” Samaranch said about his late father.
The younger Samaranch has been an IOC member for more than two decades, including seven years as vice-president. That prompted a reporter to ask him in January what kind of changes he expects to make as president that he couldn’t make during so many years on the IOC’s executive board.
He described Bach’s reign as full of “threats” and “complications.” Bach’s term included Russia’s war on Ukraine and doping scandal, plus a global pandemic. Samaranch said change will need to come even faster in the future.
The rest of the field includes International Ski and Snowboard Federation president Johan Eliasch, International Cycling Union president David Lappartient, Jordan’s Prince Feisal Al Hussein and Morinari Watanabe, who leads the International Gymnastics Federation.
Watanabe’s platform offers what may be the most radical proposal of all: staging the Games in five cities over five continents at the same time to create a 24-hour global event. According to Watanabe, that would reduce the cost of hosting and could help bring the five continents together.
Who casts a vote?
The exclusive membership of the IOC, which includes former and current athletes, heads of Olympic committees and sporting federations from across the world, and even some royalty — King Frederik X of Denmark and Monaco’s Prince Albert II, to name just two — are tasked with selecting the next president.
Much of that process has happened in the dark. Candidates each had 15 minutes to present to members at an event in Switzerland in January, but those presentations were closed to the public and not allowed to be filmed. Candidates briefly answered questions from the media after the presentations.
Likewise, the vote will happen by secret ballot, beginning around 4 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET) in Greece on Thursday.
Only one Canadian is a voting member of the IOC: Canadian Olympic Committee (COC) president Tricia Smith. She told CBC Sports the new president will play a key role in modernizing the Olympics, including digital transformation and youth engagement.
“This is a moment to find new ways to lean into the unique power sport has to bring us together, which feels more important than ever right now,” Smith said in a written statement.
As for what the COC is looking for in the next president, Smith said the IOC needs a “leader who understands and embodies the positive values of sport, stands up for integrity, good governance, and sustainability, financial and environmental, while advancing a safe and inclusive sporting environment worldwide.”
The issues
A warming climate may be the biggest challenge the next president will face, and it’s something 400 athletes from across the globe urged the candidates to prioritize in a letter released on Friday.
After devastating wildfires, Los Angeles is in the spotlight as the host of the 2028 Summer Olympics. Getting there will also mean dealing with the often-unpredictable U.S. President Donald Trump. Meeting with Trump should be high on the next IOC president’s to-do list, Samaranch told The Associated Press last week.
Lappartient, meanwhile, told Reuters last week that he would meet with Trump, too, but would stress to the American president that the IOC’s autonomy needs to be respected.
During the one media availability involving all seven candidates, many were asked about welcoming Russia back to the Olympics and what conditions would need to be met for that to happen.
Eliasch said the neutral-athlete program that allowed Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete, after a screening process that eliminated athletes who supported the war against Ukraine or the military, worked well.
Al Hussein said he’d like to see the whole world at the Olympics.
“Right now, my understanding is the exclusion of Russian athletes is based on a violation of the Olympic charter,” he said. “As president of the IOC, my role and responsibility is to uphold the Olympic charter, and as long as nobody is in violation, then there is no reason for sanctions. I would very much like to find a mechanism where we can reintroduce it. The world is stronger when we are all together.”
Some, like Coe, emphasized the need to “safeguard the female category” in his platform. As World Athletics president, his organization banned transgender athletes in 2023 and then went a step further this year, proposing changes that would extend the same rules to female athletes who have higher testosterone levels.
Coventry has taken a similar position. The only female candidate told reporters the IOC needs to have clear policies and all athletes should feel safe on the playing field.
Lappartient addressed the issue through the lens of diversity in his platform.
“It is a complex matter that must be dealt with rationally to strike the right balance between the need to respect human rights and the obligation to ensure fair competition. We cannot ignore what female athletes are saying, but our decisions must also be grounded on solid scientific evidence.”
Shaping the future of sport
The election takes place thousands of kilometres away, and can feel quite distant for people who tune into the Olympics every two years.
But the IOC president will shape how the Olympics look and feel over the next decade, and the decisions they make could determine the future of sport in Canada and beyond.
That’s why Philippe Marquis, a Canadian freestyle skier who competed at the 2014 and 2018 Olympics, thinks this election is an important one. The next president will set the tone, he said, and will decide everything from who can compete on the biggest stage to how the Olympics will navigate a changing and warming climate.
“[For] everyone, whether they’re a high-performance athlete or just recreational, I think sport plays a vital and very important place in people’s mind, people’s heart,” said Marquis, who chairs the COC’s athletes’ commission.
