The Olympic Movement has recently experienced its own Habemus papam moment. After a 12-year mandate, Thomas Bach announced his intention to step down from his position as President of the International Olympic Committee (‘IOC’) this year. Much has been made of the secrecy and lobbying that accompanies the election and creates resemblances with the papal conclave. Coupled with the fact that seven candidates were vying for the position of IOC President, the election promised to be an historic and highly contested race. Contrary to some expectations, however, it proved a relatively smooth process, with Kirsty Coventry securing the support of an absolute majority of electors in the very first round of voting. Yet, the result is undoubtedly historic. Coventry is the first woman to head the IOC in its 131-year history and takes the reins in a highly challenging environment for the organisation. In this post, I critically analyse the implications of the election for the IOC’s role in global governance and for the organisation’s engagement with international law. I highlight the key geopolitical challenges facing the IOC, especially around the organisation’s professed political neutrality and its relationship with international law and other legal regimes. I then examine the manifesto of the newly elected president and suggest we may see a new approach with respect to two items on the IOC’s international agenda – its relationship to Russia and its position on the non-discrimination of transgender and intersex athletes.
1. (Sometimes) Taking the Side of the International Community: The IOC as a Stakeholder in Global Governance
Although most of the IOC President’s responsibilities revolve around ensuring that the lucrative Olympic machinery keeps running smoothly, the IOC is also playing an increasingly important role in relation to global governance and international law. For the IOC President, this means navigating a highly polarised geopolitical environment in a manner that aligns with the organisation’s mission as enshrined in the Olympic Charter. In accordance with Fundamental Principle 5 of the Charter, all organisations within the Olympic movement are politically neutral, including the IOC. Committing to political neutrality, however, does not mean that the actions of the IOC and its President are politically insignificant. The steps taken by the IOC with respect to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine illustrate this point. The organisation was among the first international actors to impose sanctions on Russia and Belarus, basing its decision on the states’ violation of the Olympic Truce. As Carmen Pérez noted, ‘[a]lmost immediately after the invasion of Ukraine took place’, the IOC and other sports governing bodies adopted decisions that prevented international sports competitions from taking place in Russia and Belarus. Moreover, as Patricia Wiater meticulously discusses here and here, the IOC continuously sought to block the participation of athletes under the flag of the aggressor states to protect the rights of Ukrainian athletes.
The IOC President ‘represents the IOC and presides over all its activities’, and so takes a key role in driving the outward-looking, political behaviour of the organisation – one that the outgoing president Thomas Bach actively shaped in relation to Russia through his ‘pragmatic, realpolitik approach’. Indeed, in October 2023, the IOC intensified its pressure on Russia by suspending the Russian Olympic Committee (‘ROC’), effectively excluding the body from the Olympic Movement. This was prompted by the affiliation of four newly-established regional Olympic committees in occupied Ukrainian territory – in Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia – to the ROC as members. Although Russia challenged the IOC’s decision before the Court of Arbitration for Sport (‘CAS’), the tribunal concurred with the IOC’s assessment that the ROC’s decision to admit the regional committees contravened the Olympic Charter. The panel noted that ‘if the international community recognises the Regions as part of Ukraine, then the ROC’s decision to admit sports organisations from those regions as members violated the territorial integrity of the Ukrainian [National Olympic Committee, as protected by the Olympic Charter]’.
The IOC has deftly used its own governance regime and its references to the position of the ‘international community’ – expressed through UN General Assembly resolutions – to exert political pressure on Russia. In doing so, the organisation takes a clear geopolitical stance on Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine. However, the rift between the IOC and Russia does not revolve only around Ukraine. Outgoing IOC President Bach suggested that the outcry about the gender of boxers Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting and their participation in the Paris 2024 Olympics was the result of a Russian fake news campaign. In such a fraught global governance context, staying neutral might be an impossibility for the IOC, with authors worrying that neutrality is honoured only selectively, becoming an instrumental tool used to achieve specific objectives rather than a ‘fundamental principle of Olympism’. This is starkly underlined by the IOC’s decision not to impose any sanctions on Israel during the 2024 Paris Olympics, even though Israel continued its offensive during the period of the Olympic Truce and despite widespread condemnation of the Israeli occupation of Gaza by the international community.
2. Five Rings to Rule Them All: Norm Translation at the IOC and Contestations of Legal Authority
The IOC’s political neutrality also has implications for the on-going reassessment of the boundaries of sports governance, both with respect to its role within society and more specifically in terms of the division of legal authority. As regards the former, the IOC and other sports governing bodies have increasingly faced allegations of ‘sportswashing’ for organising competitions in countries that lack democratic government or where concerns exist about widespread human rights violations. Such concerns are not limited to the general situation within a host country but, as was notably the case with the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, can directly affect the organisation of a competition. In addition to raising concerns about press freedom and discrimination against women and LBTQIA+ people in Qatar, rights groups have criticised FIFA for being complicit in the abuse of migrant workers employed on construction sites for World Cup stadia or hired as security guards. What type of leverage should be applied in these situations by organisations such as FIFA or the IOC on host governments remains a contentious question, given they are private, for-profit entities. However, civil society organisations often place responsibility directly on presidents of sports governing bodies for lack of action on human rights matters.
At the same time, we are witnessing a reassessment of the boundaries of the legal authority of sports governance bodies in relation to other legal regimes. While the growing attention to the role of sporting bodies such as the IOC within global governance more generally is a major reason for this development, I would argue that two more specific factors are also important drivers. First, the IOC in particular has positioned itself as a key private ‘translator’ of international legal norms which increasingly find expression within the internal governance framework of the organisation. International human rights law and sustainability standards represent the two main areas where translation has occurred, with both areas featuring heavily in the IOC Strategic Framework on Human Rights and in recent versions of the IOC’s bidding regulations and Olympic hosting agreements. However, as the earlier discussion of sanctions highlighted, the IOC also relies on UN resolutions dealing with security and peace matters to inform its governance decisions. Second, the IOC governance framework has undergone significant juridification and constitutionalisation, crystallising a normative system that is more recognisably legal. The cumulative effect of these processes is that the legal-regulatory boundaries of IOC governance, but also lex sportiva more broadly, have become more apparent and expanded outwards to include matters that are not immediately thought of as within the province of sport, such as economic or human rights issues. This has, in turn, created more opportunities for regulatory overlap and raised the possibility of contesting the increasingly juridified normative framework through judicial avenues. Notably, the upcoming CJEU decision in Seraing will be a major opportunity for the renegotiation of the boundaries of legal authority between EU law and lex sportiva. While the dispute arose after a legal challenge by RFC Seraing against sanctions imposed by FIFA for a violation of third-party ownership rules, the CJEU case focuses on the weight to be attributed to awards by the CAS in subsequent legal proceedings. The key question before the CJEU is whether treating CAS awards as res judicata is in accordance with EU law provisions. As Duval highlights, the case could lead to a major re-evaluation of the ‘light touch supervision currently exercised’ over the CAS and bring sporting disputes back into domestic courts. The decision is hot on the heels of two further CJEU cases concerning FIFA which represent an assertion of EU law authority over sports ‘in so far as it constitutes an economic activity’. Given the IOC’s central role in protecting the regulatory autonomy of sports, such wholesale challenges to the limits of sports governance will be influential in shaping the mandate of the new IOC President.
3. Just How Transformative? Continuity and Change in the Agenda of New IOC President Kirsty Coventry
In the more than century-long history of the organisation, Coventry became the first woman to be elected, as well as the first president from outside of Europe or the USA. At the same time, however, she is widely seen as a continuity choice – Coventry has a strong relationship with the outgoing IOC President Thomas Bach. It will be interesting to see whether the ‘continuity’ label will extend to the further legalisation of the IOC, its engagement with international law, and the positioning of the organisation within global governance. Bayle highlights that Bach’s presidency was crucial in implementing institutional changes within the IOC to further good governance through ‘principles centred round greater transparency, greater gender equality, and better control mechanisms’. Coventry’s manifesto, titled ‘Unleashing the Transformative Power of Sport’, suggests that her mandate will continue this process with a focus on collaboration with actors across the Olympic Movement. Similarly, the IOC’s professed commitment to sustainability is unlikely to change under the new president, with Coventry arguing that the IOC ‘should continue partnering with the UN to strengthen our efforts’ on environmental and social responsibility. Indeed, the rhetoric of sustainability features heavily within her manifesto, although Coventry’s proposals are significantly less detailed in comparison to the other presidential candidates. Whether generic references to ‘lead[ing] by example’ and ‘championing sustainable practices’ will be sufficient to persuade critics who accuse the IOC of creating a ‘sustainability smokescreen’ is highly doubtful.
However, on some issue areas relating to international law, Coventry seems to be shifting the IOC’s current course. Coventry doubled down on the IOC’s political neutrality in her manifesto, stating that the organisation ‘must remain neutral and not co-opted for political agendas’. Moreover, in an interview after her election, she made clear her opposition to banning countries that are involved in conflicts from the Olympics and stressed the necessity of a collective conversation about readmitting Russia to the 2026 Winter Olympics. Although this might appear as a turnaround in the IOC’s positioning vis-à-vis countries undermining international peace and security, it is rather a return to the norm. After all, the IOC did not respond to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, which occurred only a few days after the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics concluded, and remains stubbornly oblivious to Israel’s campaign in Gaza. By re-asserting the IOC’s neutrality and de-escalating its position towards Russia, Coventry may avoid future allegations of double standards – but only at the cost of compromising its commitment to promoting peace.
Similarly, we may see changes in how the IOC approaches the eligibility of intersex and transgender athletes in the women’s category – arguably, sport’s major human rights topic at present. Coventry has repeatedly stated that protecting female athletes is a major priority, which is often coded language for the exclusion of male-to-female transgender athletes from the women’s category. Indeed, Coventry has indicated support for a total ban to this effect. The current IOC Framework addressing this matter leans towards an inclusive and non-discriminatory approach, emphasising that ‘criteria should be established and implemented fairly and in a manner that does not systematically exclude athletes from competition based upon their gender identity, physical appearance and/or sex variations’. However, the framework serves only as a recommendation, given that the actual eligibility regulations are within the remit of individual sports federations, and has had little impact on the approach of said federations who tend to systematically exclude transgender and intersex athletes. One example of such regulations adopted by World Athletics and applicable to intersex athletes has been challenged before the European Court of Human Rights. In its Chamber judgment in Semenya, the court criticised the World Athletics regulations as being discriminatory and disproportionate in how they balance intersex athletes’ right not to be discriminated against. Any blanket ban on transgender athletes supported by the IOC would be much stricter than the regulations challenged in Semenya and thus put the IOC on collision course with the court and other international human rights bodies. However, it should also be said that the court in Semenya emphasised that the situation of transgender and intersex athletes should not be lumped together, as ‘the weighing-up of interests in those two situations was very different’. The pending Grand Chamber referral of the case may bring more clarity on what exactly is implied in this need for a differential approach. For her part, Coventry is reported to have said that there ‘needs to be a little more sensitivity’ with respect to intersex athletes and it is unclear whether an IOC ban would cover both categories.
While Coventry is often dubbed as a continuity candidate to Thomas Bach, her manifesto and early public pronouncements suggest that the IOC under her leadership will shift course on some issues. Given the choppy geopolitical waters in which the organisation finds itself, this seems inevitable – even more so with the upcoming 2028 Olympic Games in LA and Donald Trump’s publicly frosty relationship with the IOC. Coventry will need to steer the IOC carefully to keep the organisation relevant as an international actor while staying true to the lofty goals not only of the Olympic Movement but also of the international community at large.