The Olympic Reformer: How Thomas Bach Steered the Games Through Global Turmoil

THE OLYMPIC REFORMER & RINGS OF CHANGE IN A DIVIDED WORLD  – Olympic advisor, Michael Pirrie, unpacks the tumultuous era of IOC president Thomas Bach, whose term in the top office of world sport ended earlier this week.

Thomas Bach’s recent visit to Brisbane, host city for the 2032 Olympic Games, was more than a routine inspection. As the outgoing IOC leader, the stopover symbolised the closing arc of a presidency defined by reform, resilience, and renewal. 

Joined by long-time ally John Coates, a former IOC senior vice president and a central figure in Australia’s Olympic movement, Bach’s Brisbane inspection was a full-circle moment, the bookend to a tumultuous term  marked by reform, disruption and reinvention  — and testament to a providential partnership and pivotal presidency that reshaped and modernised the Olympic movement.

This was a presidential journey that began in quiet confidence. On the eve of Bach’s election in Buenos Aires he dined discreetly with his wife, the late Australian former IOC vice president Kevan Gosper, former London 2012 Olympic Games leader and current World Athletics President Sebastian Coe, and Coates  — a calming moment before a defining vote.   

What followed was a presidency shaped by urgency, complexity, and resilience, with Bach likely to be judged as one of the most consequential leaders of the modern Olympic era.

IOC presidencies ultimately revolve around the Games that frame the eras, and Bach’s Olympic odyssey from Sochi to sanctions, Rio to reform, danger in Tokyo, peace in Pyeongchang and war in Paris was extraordinary in its scale and dimension.   

Yet amid the turmoil, Bach pursued an ambitious vision of reform and change that he believed was essential for the Olympic Movement to survive and thrive in the deteriorating global conditions.

Bach’s Agenda 2020 and Agenda 2020+5 manifestos were more than a set of policy positions – these were  programmes for a generational shift and realignment of the Olympic organisation and its evolving position in global affairs and sport.

These were also bold declarations about sport’s changing role in society beyond stadium entertainment, pointing to a new Olympic era in a new world.

Bach implemented broad brush reform that spanned the diverse Olympic canvas – from big picture international diplomacy and local initiatives on the ground and online to combat violence and cyber abuse in sport to the warm embrace of refugee athletes.

The Olympic focus on the world’s displaced communities was a recognition of sport’s values under Bach and acknowledged at Bach’s recent meeting with the new Pope – and like Leo XIV’s papal predecessors, Bach travelled widely, meeting world leaders and preaching the virtues of sport in a divided world. 

The Olympic movement’s global reach has grown significantly, with an expanding network of partnerships and collaborations with influential global institutions.

Bach, a world leader without a nation, brought the Olympic movement closer to the United Nations, G-7 and G-20 nations and other global institutions like the World Health Organisation.

RINGS OF CHANGE 

While this has given the IOC an expanded presence in global affairs, Bach has carefully reformed the Olympic Games flagship, the paramount source of the movement’s influence and impact.

Bach’s presidency involved the urgent repair of Olympic processes that threatened the movement’s sprawling multi-billion-dollar business operations that support major continental sporting events, international federations, national Olympic committees, and athletes, among other bodies, including organising committees for the Games, the life blood of the movement

The IOC distributes approximately $4.7 million per day to support athletes, sports organisations and the worldwide Olympic Movement.

Under Bach’s leadership, and with Coates as a key strategic advisor and co-architect, the IOC introduced a series of turning point improvements to the Games model – from a new host city selection process to Games focused on cost containment, youth, long term community impacts, and sustainability benchmarks  – all intended to help meet demands and expectations in a changing world.

The reforms, which centre largely around avoiding unnecessary new construction, have pushed budgets downward, making the Games more attractive and feasible to host,  halting a sharp decline of interest in staging the Games. 

If the future of the Olympic movement depends on a pool of quality cities willing to host the world’s biggest event, these reforms were the most fundamental of the volatile Bach era. 

Turbulence seemed an omnipresent, threatening the Olympic establishment and other global institutions.

OLYMPIC OBSTACLES COURSE

International headwinds gusted at gale force, driven by economic hardship, political upheaval, health crisis, expanding military conflict and global uncertainty. 

Bach’s time at the helm required constant adaptation, with Olympic planning reimagined in the face of enormous uncertainty and adversity — from pandemics and political instability to mounting economic and environmental pressures and widening conflict on the Olympic home continent of Europe and in the Middle East more recently.

Musical arrangements accompanying performances at the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Games – on the nuclear missile armed Korean Peninsula – entitled “Ring of Death,” “Secret Spies” and “Oblivion,” provided a surreal soundtrack to the Bach presidency and reflected the rising geopolitical tensions and risk in sport’s changing international environment.

As well as military wars, there were culture wars, gender wars, sex chromosome doping fears, and ideological battles in an era of rapid social, cultural, and technological change that transcended traditional boundaries of the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

“To avoid the loss of fair opportunity, males must not compete in the female categories,” and human rights positions “must continue to be consistent with science and fact,” said a specialist United Nations report into the women’s boxing gender storm at the Paris Games. 

Bach, an Olympic fencer with a passion for football in his youth, was an adept diplomat, dressed in a business suit that covered a sports track suit as he balanced sports and international tensions

Bach tried to lead from the middle, searching for neutral political ground: keeping the worldwide Olympic movement from fragmenting across a geopolitically divided decade was his greatest challenge and triumph.

OLYMPIC FLASHPOINT

The Olympic movement was inevitably drawn into the orbits of superpower conflicts and agendas that encircled the Games cities of Bach’s presidency.

 Russia was the Olympic wrecking ball, inflicting damage across the entire sporting decade, from its  covert doping operations at Sochi in 2014 to cyberattacks that threatened vital Games computer sports data and information in Paris.     

China’s widely condemned human rights record prompted a US-Government led diplomatic boycott of the Beijing 2022 Games, which served as a political backdrop to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that followed the Games.   

The invasion also followed the Kremlin’s imprisonment of US Olympic gold medal basketballer, Brittney Griner, who was kidnapped as political hostage on the eve of Russia’s war

Putin’s refusal to stop the slaughter of human life in Ukraine was an Olympic turning point and took sport to a new flashpoint.

With new graveyards and cemeteries constantly filling, the purpose and relevance of neutrality wasstretched to breaking point. The international community could not remain neutral nor impartial to the horrors, and more than 30 nations called for athletes from Russian sport to be banned from the Paris Games.   

Bach’s presidency reflected the anxious times, marked by crisis, reform and search for meaning, inclusion, and safety in a disrupted world.  

The moral appeal of the Olympic values provided a powerful counterpoint and strengthened emotional ties to the Games, while uplifting, record breaking performances by athletes maintained the Olympic aura.

The safe delivery of the pandemic hit Tokyo Games (and billions in Games revenues), overseen by Coates as IOC Coordination Commission chair, was a defining point – a global hallmark of hope, symbolizing the unifying power of sport in the face of doomsday virus scenarios.

In an editorial of concern before the Games, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine stated: “…the Olympic Games are one of the few events that could connect us at a time of global disconnect…” 

IOC  ON HIGH ALERT 

The IOC executive office in Lausanne, led by talented Executive Director, Christophe Dubi, played a key role  navigating the Olympic obstacles course, and was on constant high alert attempting to anticipate and respond to the changing global conditions. 

Not all key figures were located at Olympic HQ in Lausanne. Former WADA leader, the senior IOC member and Olympic Order recipient, Sir Craig Reedie, and antidoping hawks, Dick Pound and Richard Mc Laren, revealed a vast doping conspiracy stretching from deep inside Kremlin controlled laboratories into almost every high-level sporting program and system in Russia – a system described by Coates as “rotten to the core.”

Russia’s state sanctioned doping operation was the biggest scandal to engulf sport and led to pioneering changes to better restrict, monitor and detect athlete doping. 

Reedie’s WADA reforms were paramount to stabilizing confidence in elite sports governance and competition, and among the most important of the Bach era, even if more recent doping controversies remain.

The Unified Korean women’s ice hockey team in Pyeongchang and IOC Refugee Olympic teams were iconic moments in world sport and unique to the Games under Bach.

The reality of the teams pointed to the Olympic movement’s evolving peace mission and pointed to where Bach was taking the movement, aligning sport with wider global agendas.

NEW OLYMPICS FOR A NEW WORLD 

Bach recognized and sought to respond to the changing global mood of distrust of major international institutions in uncertain times, and that to remain influential the Olympic movement must be relevant beyond sport. 

London’s pioneering International Inspiration sports-based programs of education and opportunity for disadvantaged young people were broadened and adapted to help address further global concerns ranging from climate change, human rights and youth engagement to development and equality.

This has strengthened the Olympic brand and its position globally.   

The 128-year-old gender gap at the Games was closed in Paris where women made up 50 per cent of athletes for the first time, making the Games the largest gender equal sporting event in the world. 

Conclusion

While the Samaranch presidency delivered extraordinary global expansion and Rogge’s reign was built on caution and consolidation following the Salt Lake City crisis, Bach’s leadership has centred on urgent reform and crisis management through constant change in response to dire global situations and vulnerable Olympic systems and processes that risked the movement.

If the Olympic movement was listed on a global stock market, shares would have moved and traded rapidly during the Bach era, plunging and rising sharply as conditions for international sport fluctuated wildly before settling on a bullish high in Paris.   

The key performance indicators for the Games at the end of Bach’s term remain strong, despite the often daunting circumstances, and the Olympic Movement seems more self-assured and settled in its broad strategic vision, direction and role in an unstable world. 

The Olympic outlook has changed and appears more youthful and more relevant and resilient in a fragile world, gaining healthy revenue growth under Bach’s tenure.

The movement is more connected too – Games global media engagement has increased significantly, with the pivotal transition from broadcast to younger digital and social media audiences gaining momentum.

If Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 will be remembered for how well Bach’s teams negotiated crisis, Brisbane 2032 may test whether the ambitious reforms of the Bach term can be fully realised.

As such, the final chapter of Bach’s presidency is still being written, and the transition earlier this week from Bach to new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, the first woman to lead sport’s most influential governing body, was more than ceremonial – this was a handover of both vision and office. 

With John Coates holding an important Brisbane Games oversight position, Bach’s place in Olympic history has a true symmetry – with the delivery of the 2032 Games, based on key reforms of the Bach-Coates era, now resting in the hands of Bach’s loyal lieutenant and his history making presidential successor.

 Michael Pirrie led global executive communications for the London 2012 Olympic Games, and is one of  a small number of international advisors to have worked on two successful Olympic Games bid campaigns.