Thomas Bach

The world has changed, Seb Coe says: track and field winners at Games to get paid

The world has changed, Seb Coe says: track and field winners at Games to get paid

A few weeks back came the announcement of the Friendship Games, to be held in Russia in September. Total prize money across all sports: $100 million. Winners get $40,000. Second place, $25,000. Third: $17,000.

On Wednesday, World Athletics, the No. 1 sport in the Olympic landscape, made a precedent-setting move, announcing it would pay gold medalists at the Paris Games. Total prize money: $2.4 million. Winners across each of the four dozen track and field events will receive $50,000 each. Relay teams will split the $50k. Starting in Los Angeles in 2028, silver and bronze medalists will also be paid. 

The timing may seem like World Athletics is following the Russians. To be clear, very clear: it is not. 

“I have to accept the world has changed,” World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said Wednesday in an interview with Steve Scott at ITV.

Sitting ducks, in a boat on the River. Plan B, please. Give peace a chance, really

Sitting ducks, in a boat on the River. Plan B, please. Give peace a chance, really

Four months ago, in the first week of December 2023, I wrote that the Paris 2024 opening ceremony needed a Plan B.

Since then, I have had dozens of conversations with people inside and outside the Olympic movement. No one has said the idea of a flotilla of boats, the athletes of the world floating down the River Seine for six kilometers, or three-plus miles, is good. Almost everyone has said the same thing about this idea: it’s flawed.

For the sake of all that is decent in our world, the hope here is that they pull it off. But it so obviously seems the farthest thing from safe. 

In a world of disruption, the Olympics confronts the World Friendship Games

In a world of disruption, the Olympics confronts the World Friendship Games

The No. 1 complaint athletes have about the Olympic movement is that they can’t make money.

Meet the International Olympic Committee-disapproved Friendship Games, coming this September in Russia: 36 sports, 21 venues, 17 in Moscow, four in Ekaterinburg (including track and field Sept. 18-22).

Total prize money, across all sports: $100 million. Winners get $40,000. Second place, $25,000. Third, $17,000. No ‘Olympic village.’ Instead, you’ll be welcome in three- or four-star hotels.

Push, meet shove – brought to the world in some significant measure by Umar Kremlev, arguably one of the most provocative and interesting figures in world sport in 2024. 

Rough justice 4 teen girls: Kamila, u get 4 yrs 4 1st offense. Adults? Whut?

Rough justice 4 teen girls: Kamila, u get 4 yrs 4 1st offense. Adults? Whut?

From the get-go, there was never any question there was a substance in the Russian skater Kamila Valieva’s 15-year-old body that shouldn’t have been there.

The issues all along were: 1/ where did that substance, the banned substance trimetazidine, or TMZ, come from, 2/ and what to do about it, since she was 15, and in theory someone who is 15 ought not be treated the same under the rules, anyone’s rules, as someone who is, say, 32. 

Put aside everything else – and there’s so much connected to the Valieva matter, which threatened to all but eclipse everything that wasn’t Valieva at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games – and those two keys make up the core of Monday’s Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport judgment, which said those rules mean Valieva deserves to be treated like a grown-up. 

So, it said, she got what she deserves, the usual: a four-year ban.

For, let’s note, a first offense.

Casey Wasserman at the IOC and unequivocally in solidarity with Israel

Casey Wasserman at the IOC and unequivocally in solidarity with Israel

MUMBAI — Presenting Monday to the International Olympic Committee at its 141st assembly, Casey Wasserman, chair of the LA28 organizing committee, said, “I unequivocally stand in solidarity with Israel.

“But let me be clear. I also stand with the innocent civilians in Gaza who did not choose this war.”

Wasserman’s remarks marked part of a stirring one-two combo in which he and former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, now the U.S. ambassador to India, served noticed that sports and politics assuredly do mix.

AI comes to the IOC and says it and Olympic movement need, uh-oh, 'radical overhaul'

AI comes to the IOC and says it and Olympic movement need, uh-oh, 'radical overhaul'

MUMBAI – International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach’s manta, change or be changed, is apt. 

The challenge facing the IOC, the Olympic Games, indeed the wider Olympic movement, is both fundamental and existential. All of it is a 19th-century construct. Owing to broadcast television, U.S.-driven corporate sponsorship and, to some extent, Cold War rivalries, it found its footing in the 20th century. Now it is struggling to find a way in our 21st century. 

Television ratings are down. The sponsor program needs a far-reaching re-do. Change is not an option. It’s a must. It’s why, as part of his speech Saturday night here opening the IOC’s 141st session, Bach for the first time made extensive reference to the possibilities of artificial intelligence and, too, announced the IOC would study the creation of an “Olympic Esports Games.”

Change is one thing. But the IOC is furiously slapping at different currents, trying to find direction, not least about its own rules and about whether Bach or someone else ought to be in charge come 2025, when Bach, in theory, is due to step down.

Taylor Swift has what the Olympics needs. These five sports for LA28 are not it

Taylor Swift has what the Olympics needs. These five sports for LA28 are not it

MUMBAI – Squash? Really? That’s part of a purportedly cool plan to draw in tweens, teens and 20-somethings? Weed is legal in California, no problem out of competition, thank you doping control, but that is the idea? Seriously? Squash?

I teach college students at the University of Southern California, a key piece of the International Olympic Committee’s target audience. When the discussion came up this week in class about the five new sports the Los Angeles 2028 said it was proposing, squash, yay, and four others, a package the IOC executive board ratified here Friday for confirmation by its assembly in a few days, one of my students who consistently sees right through institutional BS called it the way it is:

“What,” he said, “is squash?”

Is the Olympic movement at a history-making inflection point?

Is the Olympic movement at a history-making inflection point?

Is the Olympic movement at an inflection point?

Let’s face it, the Games are prone to strong sentiments and strong statements. It’s easy to get swept away by the passion and the emotion that the Olympics evoke – after all, that’s the source of their appeal. 

But if that question has ever been worth asking, perhaps it’s now.

This week, on September 10, it will be a full 10 years since Thomas Bach was elected president of the International Olympic Committee.

The IOC president v. the sheikh: hardball, as real as it gets

The IOC president v. the sheikh: hardball, as real as it gets

A shockwave of epic proportions boomed out Thursday across the Olympic world. 

The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, opted to take on – with the obvious goal of taking out – Kuwait’s Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah, the kingmaker once and perhaps again. 

The obvious question: why? The follow-on: will Bach succeed? The IOC president is nothing if not intelligent and calculated. Then again, so is the sheikh.

The IOC confronts a changing, emerging, new world order -- and loses. Now what?

The IOC confronts a changing, emerging, new world order -- and loses. Now what?

For nearly 10 years, since he was elected president of the International Olympic Committee, it has been a rare thing for Thomas Bach to be told no. 

And for good reason. Despite his many vocal critics, almost all of whom have little to no idea how the IOC or the Olympic movement works in the real world, history will likely record Bach as the most consequential IOC president other than Juan Antonio Samaranch. Perhaps even more so.

Bach’s mantra is simple: change or be changed. He has sought to drag a traditional, conservative, European-oriented institution into the 21st century. He can claim considerable success, implementing major reforms, including the end of the corruption-plagued host-city elections.

Thus what happened Saturday, at an election for the presidency of the Olympic Council of Asia, amounts to the first signs of what may well be not just restlessness but pushback if not potent insurrection in the Olympic movement – one year ahead of Paris 2024 and two years before Bach is due to step down as president.