The International Olympic Committee’s birthday is this Friday. On June 23, 129 years ago, Pierre de Coubertin founded the IOC, which is celebrated with the first “Olympic E-Sports Week”. This “week” in Singapore lasts three and a half days. At the opening, IOC President Thomas Bach appeared as a hologram in the city-state and reminded the participants – Bach spoke of players, not athletes – of the Olympic motto: Faster, higher, stronger – together.
Before he proposed two years ago to extend De Coubertin’s old motto with the addition “together”, Bach said at the time, he had the founding father approve the idea in a mental dialogue. Bach wanted to see a smile on the Coubertin bust in the garden of the IOC quarter.
One day before the holiday, on Thursday, the International Boxing Association IBA found out how times together ended. Bach had invited to an extraordinary IOC session to have the Olympic recognition withdrawn from the IBA. The result was a confirmation of the balance of power: 69 votes in favour, one against, ten abstentions. As in 2021, the IOC will organize the Olympic boxing tournament in Paris next year itself.
Right decision
Nobody, Bach said, has “a problem with boxing,” one of the “truly global sports.” But under the Russian Umar Kremlev, once a member of the “Night Wolves”, a motorcycle gang that pays homage to Vladimir Putin and is therefore under Kremlin patronage, the “drastic change in the leadership of the association” called for by the IOC did not occur, as it was said on Thursday.
That’s correct given the shamelessness that the IBA allows itself under Kremlev. But in view of the shamelessness that was common among his predecessors in this association, which was still abbreviated at the time to AIBA, it’s an expulsion that comes a few decades too late. The Taiwanese Wu Ching-kuo, for example, had to resign as AIBA President in 2017, and he withdrew from the IOC “on medical advice” in 2020. The AIBA had already been suspended for three quarters of a year.
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But the expulsion not least strengthens Bach. If the IOC appoints another association, its officials are grateful. At the same time, Bach kicked out a Russian-dominated association. This helps the IOC President, who on Thursday tried to convince Ukrainian athletes to give up opposition to their own government. So that they simulate peace, compete in Paris with athletes from the country whose ruler Putin murders their compatriots and destroys their livelihoods. So that they compete according to Bach’s ideas.