IOC Presidency: Time for the big oral for David Lappartient and his rivals, in an uncertain campaign

David Lappartient prétendant à la présidence du CIO, aux côtés de Thomas Bach EPA – MOHAMMED BADRA

Indécise comme rarement dans l’histoire olympique, la campagne pour remplacer en mars le président du CIO Thomas Bach va connaître jeudi une étape majeure : le grand oral des sept prétendants devant les membres de l’organisation.

“If one of the candidates is a little weak in speaking, the election is so open that it can make a big difference”, Jean-Loup Chappelet, an Olympic specialist at the University of Lausanne, told AFP.
The presentations by Frenchman David Lappartient, British Sebastian Coe and their five rivals will take place by videoconference and behind closed doors, like this quasi-papal election and its drastic confidentiality rules.
They will nevertheless have ten minutes each in front of the press gathered in Lausanne from 11:30 a.m., the first opportunity to hear them all since the German Thomas Bach, by refusing last August to extend beyond 2025, launched the race for his succession.
Scheduled for March 20 in Costa Navarino (Greece), on the shores of the Ionian Sea, the election promises to be the polar opposite of the previous ballot, in 2021, which marked the re-election by an overwhelming majority of Thomas Bach, then the only one in the running.
The consensus surrounding the former Bavarian fencer, at the head of the Olympic organization since 2013, is followed by a confrontation between seven contenders with very different profiles, around economic, political and environmental.

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Olympics on five continents

Some are former champions, such as Zimbabwean Kirsty Coventry, 41, a seven-time Olympic swimming medallist, and World Athletics boss Sebastian Coe, 68, a two-time Olympic 1500m champion and boss of the 2012 London Olympics.
Others run international federations, such as gymnastics for Japan’s Morinari Watanabe and skiing for Sweden’s Johan Eliasch, or even combine the role with running a national Olympic committee, such as France’s David Lappartient, president of the International Cycling Union.
Finally, the last two are figures on the IOC’s powerful Executive Board: Prince Feisal Al-Hussein, son of the former King of Jordan, and Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, son of the iconic IOC President between 1980 and 2001.
In their programs unveiled at the end of December, all of them cover the main issues facing the body, from securing its revenues to the impact of global warming and artificial intelligence.
But their proposals differ markedly, the most radical coming from Morinari Watanabe: the Japanese proposes to spread the Summer Games across five cities located on each continent, with continuous streaming.
A few months after the controversy over the gender of two gold medal-winning boxers at the Paris Olympics, Algerian Imane Khelif and Taiwanese Lin Yu-ting, Sebastian Coe and Johan Eliasch insist on the “safeguarding of women's sport”, on which their rivals are more discreet.

What to do with the Russians ?

On the political side, there is no shortage of challenges for an IOC that has historically been concerned about the “autonomy” of the sporting world: how to engage with Donald Trump in anticipation of the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles ? What attitude should be taken towards the Taliban to protect Afghan sportswomen ? How to help Palestinian sport crushed by the Israeli offensive ? And what to do with the Russians nearly three years after the invasion of Ukraine ?
On this omnipresent subject at the end of the Bach era, David Lappartient and Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr cautiously suggest that the Russians will have to be reintegrated into the sporting world, but without specifying under what conditions: under a neutral banner, drop by drop and outside team events, as at the Paris Olympics ? Or by returning to the anthem, flag and bloated delegation as of the 2026 Olympic Games in Milan-Cortina ?
Sebastian Coe, on the other hand, has maintained a policy of pure and simple exclusion at World Athletics, and does not even mention the Russians and their Belarusian allies in his manifesto.
His geopolitical priority is rather “to reach untapped markets with high potential, particularly in Africa and Asia”. An important signal since the next major decision of the body will be to award the 2036 Summer Olympics, for which India, South Africa and Indonesia are candidates, with Qatar and Saudi Arabia lying in wait.