Once upon a time, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach and Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics, track and field’s global governing body, were the closest of friends.
“Best buddies,” said Olympic historian David Owen.
They first met at the transformative XI Olympic Congress in Baden-Baden, a West German resort town, in September 1981 as part of a select group of 38 active and medal winning Olympians invited to the conference to the conference.
Besides Bach, winner of a fencing gold medal for West Germany at the 1976 Olympic Games, the group included Cuban boxing champion Teofilo Stevenson, Soviet goaltending icon Vladislav Tretyak, and Kip Keino, the man who launched Kenya’s distance running dynasty with his upset of Jim Ryun at the 1968 Games in the thin air of Mexico City.
Yet even in such an accomplished group, Coe, then the reigning Olympic 1,500-meter champion, stood out. At the first Congress in which athletes were invited to speak, an event that the IOC would claim 40 years later “changed the Olympic Movement forever,” Coe was selected to deliver the closing statement.
This week Bach, 71, and Coe, 68, the best of buddies now the bitterest of enemies, return to another European resort spot, Greece’s Costa Navarino, for another potentially course altering IOC meeting with Coe once again determined to have the last word.
Whether Coe is successful in his final Olympic race, the IOC presidential election on Thursday, will be the final test of the power Bach has consolidated and wielded over the organization for the past 12 years.
Coe is the most famous of seven candidates seeking the votes of the IOC’s 109 members in what sports ethics expert Jens Sejer Andersen described as “the most secretive election I think we’ve ever had in Olympic history.”
“The IOC is not a broken organization but it can be so much better and it needs change. There is too much power in the hands of too few people. The decision-making processes are out of balance and the fences need to be taken down. The members are underutilized. There is no shortage of talent and I want to take advantage of the huge bank of knowledge and experience that exists there.””I know there is an appetite for change from the members.”
He is, according to a consensus among longtime IOC watchers, the most qualified candidate to lead the IOC when the Olympic Games return Los Angeles for a third time in 2028.
“I’ve effectively been preparing for this role my whole life, which has always been dedicated to sport,” Coe recently told reporters. “I don’t know if my approach will ruffle the feathers of current senior officials but that’s not my concern. My only interest is in making the organization better.”
Lord Sebastian Newbold Coe is the only two-time winner of the men’s Olympic 1,500 gold medal, a former member of Parliament, the man who rescued London’s bid to host the 2012 Olympics and then oversaw those hugely successful Games and for the past decade the transformative president of World Athletics.
“If you look at his CV it is brilliant,” said Andersen, founder of the Play The Game, a Denmark-based initiative aimed at raising the ethical standards of sport, promoting democracy, transparency, and freedom of expression in world sport.
“It’s hard to imagine a career in sport, in sport leadership that will prepare anyone better for the IOC presidency. … In that sense, he is clearly the strongest candidate.
“But that’s not the same as to say you will also be the winning candidate.”
For one thing, Coe’s most formidable opponent will not be on the ballot but behind the scenes.
“Coe can count on Bach as an opponent in the corridors,” Andersen said.
Bach’s handpicked candidate is Kirsty Coventry, 41, an IOC member and two-time Olympic swimming gold medalist from Zimbabwe, who if elected would be the first woman and first African to lead the IOC in its 131-year history.
“Coventry is his preferred candidate,” said Owen, who is covering the IOC election for the Zeus Files, a Substack platform covering the Olympics.
Bach and Coventry have downplayed his support of her candidacy in recent weeks and months.
“I don’t feel that he is out campaigning for me,” Coventry said in a January conference call with reporters. “I think he’s being very fair to all of us.”
Bach was defensive earlier this week when asked if he had lobbied IOC voters on Coventry’s behalf.
“What I felt obliged to say about the profile of my successor I have said in Paris,” Bach said Monday. “I have nothing to add to this.”
A potential beneficiary of the Bach-Coe feud could be Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., the son of the former IOC president.
During the Olympic Games, Bach, who is unable to run for re-election because of IOC term limits, when asked about his successor said, “New times are calling for new leaders.”
“There is no doubt that Thomas Bach has been very enthusiastic about Kirsty Coventry,” Andersen said. “When she was the athlete committee chair for a number of years she would never say anything that did not sound as if it did not come directly from Bach’s own lips.”
Thursday’s election is just the latest example of Bach’s tight grip on the IOC.
“If I was the president I think I’d be a little more flexible,” Prince Feisal al Hussein of Jordan, another IOC presidential candidate, told reporters.
Candidates were each limited to a single 15-minute presentation to IOC voters at the organization’s Lausanne headquarters. The presentations were not broadcast. IOC voters were not allowed to ask questions during the presentations or publicly endorse candidates. The IOC also barred candidates from releasing campaign videos, participating in public debates or organizing public meetings.
“The IOC is not known for being very open and transparent but this seems to be managed very tightly by Thomas Bach via his henchmen on the ethics committee,” Andersen said.
“I think Bach is always managing things so he will get the result he wishes for.”
Bach and Coe’s path to power began at the landmark IOC Congress 44 years ago.
Coe arrived at Kurhaus, the Baden-Baden Corinthian columned casino and spa near the edge of the Black Forest, in late September 1981 having spent six busy weeks racing across the the world’s front pages.
It was at the height of Coe’s rivalry with Steve Ovett, a record-shattering competition that would make the two British middle distance runners the most famous athletes on the planet, a rivalry so compelling that it would play a significant role in releasing track and field athletes from chains and hypocrisy of amateurism making a sport second only to soccer in global popularity finally truly professional.
Over nine glorious days in August, Coe and Ovett held the world captive as they traded the world record in the mile, the sport’s most storied standard, Coe in Zurich breaking Ovett’s mark from a year earlier, Ovett reclaiming the record in Koblenz and then Coe in Brussels knocking more than a second off the record, lowering it to 3 minutes, 47.33, a mark that would stand for four years.
A month later he would continue to break new ground with the IOC.
Marlene Dietrich once called the Kurhaus “the most beautiful casino in the world.” Dostoyevsky based his novel “The Gambler” on a trip to the resort. Later the venue would play host to NATO. The Congress transformed the IOC, marking the first time it would give athletes a real voice in the Olympic movement, create an athlete commission and lead to a series of reforms.
The leading voices would be Coe and Bach.
“The two leaders who emerged were Coe and Bach,” Owen said.
The German fencer and the Yorkshire miler hit it off right away.
Bach called Coe “Shakespeare.”
Coe called Bach “the Professor.”
“Bach was the strategist,” Owen said. “Coe was the orator.”
But in the past decade, Bach has increasingly seen Coe as a threat to his power.
“Bach likes to control everything and Coe is his own man,” Owen said.
And so the friendship turned into an increasingly bitter, often public, feud.
Dostoyevsky wrote in The Gambler, “people really do like seeing their best friends humiliated.”
On no topic has the differences between the two men been greater than on Russia.
Coe was the leading voice for Russia being banned from international competition after Russia’s state-sponsored doping program was exposed in 2016 and led to Russian athletes being stripped of 51 Olympic medals. Bach on the other hand successfully pushed for Russians to be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games as neutrals.
Coe and World Athletics banned Russian and Belarussian athletes from all international track competitions after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“I am not a neutral,” Coe said.
Again Bach, who has long been widely criticized for being too deferential to Russian President Vladimer Putin and Chinese President Xi Jingping, took a more conciliatory approach to Russia.
“The Olympic Games must always build bridges,” Bach said in 2023. “The Olympic Games must never erect walls.”
“Athletics will not be on the wrong side of history,” Coe said in response.
“Bach has never forgiven that Coe has had a very principled stance on Russia since the outbreak of the Russian international doping scandal which had its roots in athletics,” Andersen said. “Coe has been very clear about a collective ban, whereas Bach has along the way has deliberately created much uncertainty, confusion, making sure the Russians will get as lenient treatment as possible.
“It was only on top of the doping scandal when Russia invaded Ukraine that Bach had to react.”
Then last summer in the run-up to the Paris Olympics, Coe infuriated Bach by announcing that World Athletics had created a $2.4 million payoff fund for athletes at the 2024 Games, gold medalists receiving $50,000. Coe made the announcement without giving Bach or the IOC a heads-up ahead of time.
“The last straw was the prize money,” Owen said.
Besides Russia, Bach’s successor will have to deal with issues ranging from transgender athletes to climate change. But he also leaves the organization with financial stability. Commercial revenues have grown 60 percent during his presidency to $7.7 billion, Bach said this week. NBC and the IOC recently agreed to $3 billion U.S. television rights extension to 2036. He successfully navigated the Olympic Games through the COVID pandemic.
Bach has been, Andersen said an “incredibly efficient administrator. The kind of president that the IOC system plays up to. … It’s a dream of the IOC to have a president that pulls all the strings. If you compare the whole political network of national Olympic committees, and international federations, and IOC members and other institutions that are on the side of the Olympic movement, it’s like a huge orchestra and Bach has been the conductor that could make them all play by the same tune, some would say a quite monotonous melody and not very creative. But he has provided stability financially and politically and at times under quite difficult circumstances.”
And Thursday will determine if the IOC members will be on the same page as the German conductor one last time.
“I don’t think it’s a referendum on Bach,” Owen said. “It’s a test of how his writ still works, whether he is still calling the shots
“Every major decision the last eight years has been what Bach wanted. This is a test of whether that’s the case where he can control things from the grave.”