Always straddling the argument, Olympic chief Bach must pick a side over Russian athletes in Paris

By James Toney

Praised, criticised, respected and maligned, Thomas Bach still remains resolute in his role as the omnipotent ringleader in the five-ringed Olympic circus.

Friends say the former fencing gold medallist thinks five moves ahead, a key skill in a role than requires top-level diplomatic street smarts, while a small but growing number of detractors dismiss him as a monotone and increasingly tin-eared autocrat.

When elected ten years ago, he highlighted a 'sea of troubles' for the Olympic movement, Bach is not a man prone to exaggeration but he may have been underselling it.

The 69-year old German does not boast the flair - or menace - of Juan Antonio Samaranch, who professionalised and commercialised the Games for two decades before the turn of the century.

But he has built such an unwavering powerbase that allies and foes agree he has become perhaps the most influential president in the history of the Olympics.

After deftly charting the treacherous waters of the pandemic, Bach is known to love a maritime metaphor, he thought his final term of office, which expires in 2025, would be plain sailing, any dissenters in the ranks silenced by a mandate that saw him win 93 of the 94 votes from his fellow members.

His re-election was a virtual love-in, held virtually, the International Olympic Committee releasing pictures of Bach, arms outstretched in front of a giant video wall, after the least contentious Zoom call ever. The levels of obsequiousness would have embarrassed Xi Jinping.

It's all rather remarkable considering the Games the German has presided over.

First there was Sochi, at $50bn the most expensive ever staged, where a state-run Russian doping operation delivered gold after gold - many since expunged - for the chest thumping hosts.

Then followed Rio, mired in corruption and organisational chaos, and PyeongChang, where Russian intelligence operatives conducted a sophisticated cyberhack on the opening ceremony.

The one-year delay to Tokyo's Games, held behind closed doors, cost over $3 billion, while the last Winter Olympics was held in zero-Covid China, a country above only Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan in the World Press Freedom Index.

Even Bach gave the impression Beijing was just too much, awkwardly conflating genocide with a 'political dispute', while standing under a banner that proclaimed 'Together for a Shared Future', the sort of slogan only seen at the Olympics and adverts for provincial building societies.

For a man usually prone to talking in carefully scripted diplomatic soundbites, it's nearly a year since he took off the gloves and came out swinging hard, in a press conference that seasoned observers hailed as unprecedented.

Bach could barely contain his anger after Kamila Valieva, a 15-year old Russian skater, tested positive for a banned substance, followed by an unsavoury fortnight of headlines that overshadowed the Games.

When the face of your showpiece is a child doper, it’s time for a rethink.

Often dismissed as a forgiving puppet of Vladimir Putin, Bach virtually turned a blind eye to Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, just days after they'd hosted the world in Sochi.

But when their tanks rolled across the Ukrainian border on February 24 last year, the IOC seized the moral initiative, insisting both Russian and Belarusian athletes should immediately be banned from international competitions as a price for breaking the Olympic Truce.

They even rescinded the prized ‘Gold Order' they awarded Putin in 2001, though it took way more than three strikes on his rap sheet before they acted.

One year on and Bach's position regarding these athletes is slowly softening, something that's been clear if you read between the lines of his public comments in the last six months.

And it represents an existential crisis for the Paris Olympics, potentially far greater than Covid.

Bach cites a claim from UN experts Alexandra Xanthaki and Ashwini K.P. that block banning athletes because of their nationality would amount to discrimination and racial profiling.

He claims this is true to long held Olympic ideals, though its a rather revisionist rendering of history, German athletes were banned from the 1920, 1924 and 1948 Games, although both World Wars had concluded.

However, it's a stand that could see him quickly lose any moral authority and, more importantly, that thumping Olympic majority too, because, as ever in these Games, money talks.

Ukraine's Olympic Committee have already called for a boycott and athlete advocacy organisation, Global Athlete, never friends of Bach, have slammed the IOC for being 'on the wrong side of history'.

They've already been publicly supported by Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden while the UK culture minister vowed to help 'coordinate an international response', hosting a summit of 30 nations, including the USA, Canada, France, Germany, aimed at getting Bach to reconsider.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who addressed the meeting, claimed athletes competing under a neutral flag will be 'stained with blood'. It's rhetoric you can expect to scale up in the months ahead.

"We're approaching a year since this barbaric invasion began. We must urge the IOC to show that the Olympic values mean something," said the UK's new culture secretary Lucy Frazer.

"We must make clear there are consequences to this illegal invasion. We cannot allow Russian athletes to line up alongside Team GB and everyone else on the world stage."

All of which leaves Bach in a fix with little room for manoeuvre, though politicians don't decide on whether teams attend the Games, that call rests with national Olympic committees, which is why Great Britain competed at the 1980 Moscow Games, despite Margaret Thatcher demanding they didn't.

For someone so innately political, Bach frets constantly about the impact of geopolitics on his beloved 'movement', rightly claiming there was no talk of a ban for the USA and allies when they invaded Iraq or Saudi Arabia for their bloody intervention in the Yemeni Civil War, just two of countless examples.

He claims a boycott would violate rules, the sacred 'Olympic Charter', stopping just inches short of saying Ukraine may be banned themselves for initiating such talk, a threat to a country whose civilians are sheltering from frequent missile attacks, an interesting strategy.

There are just over 500 days to the Paris Games open with a spectacular ceremony on the River Seine and the countdown clock ticks ever louder, especially for their president.

Olympic partners, who pay millions to tether their brand to the Games, are starting to feel twitchy. These 14 big-name companies contribute a combined $3 billion for a four-year top tier Olympic sponsorship, now a bigger source of revenue to the Games than broadcasting rights.

The pandemic forced them to junk best-laid plans for Tokyo, while in Beijing many made the decision not to shout about their partnerships due to pressure from human rights groups.

Stuck between not wanting to insult the Chinese government or risk offending to their customers, saying nothing proved prudent, though when you've paid millions for commercial rights, it's hardly good business in pursuit of a return on investment.

"We scaled back enormously for Tokyo and in Beijing, our plans were a fraction of what they'd normally be, because of the human rights narrative. If we feel the pressure over this situation with Ukraine, who knows what will happen," said one senior executive at a European-based top level sponsor.

"At the moment all the political pressure from Ukraine is on governments, we know that will switch to brands - just as it did last year after the invasion last year. It's going to put us in a very delicate position and how the IOC handle it will be key, we’re certainly watching carefully.”

Bach points out that Russian and Ukrainian athletes have competed against each other since the invasion, Kateryna Baindl beating Kamilla Rakhimova at the recent Australian Open in Melbourne, where the women's singles was won by Belarus's Aryna Sabalenka.

However, his proposed neutral athlete status - Russia hasn't competed at the Games in their own right since 2016 due to their doping transgressions - is a fig leaf concept.

There is no mistaking who these neutrals, variously dubbed 'Olympic Athletes from Russia' or 'Russian Olympic Committee athletes', represent.

There may be no Russian flags waved or anthems sung but their kit was still red, white and blue, and they wrapped themselves in the tricolor when they returned home for a heroes' reception in Moscow.

"The IOC's inverted stance towards the aggressor and the victim of this war flouts the Olympic charter and undermines peace," said a statement released by Ukrainian athletes.

"Russia's war of aggression has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, destroyed infrastructure, threatened the stability of the global food supply, and risked nuclear catastrophe.

"By welcoming Russian athletes back to the Olympic Games, the IOC is rewarding Russia's actions. By threatening to punish the NOC of Ukraine for declining to compete against Russia at the Olympic Games, the IOC is denying Ukraine's right to sovereignty.

"The IOC is rewarding Putin's aggression while the death and destruction of his victims are being ignored. The IOC must choose a side in this war."

The world of Olympic politics is outwardly genial but inwardly cut-throat. Chameleon Bach has thrived and survived by always straddling the argument and networking relentlessly with friend and foe alike.

"Sport must be politically neutral, but sport cannot be apolitical," he once said.

However, in sport sometimes you also have to pick sides and Bach - a man famously described as having a ‘foot in three camps’ - will be judged on where he pins his colours.