The Olympics faces an ‘existential threat’ in Trump and Putin’s new world order ...Middle East

The Olympic Games is under threat.

A cornerstone of the global sporting calendar that resonates far beyond the track or the pool, the Olympics now finds itself at the centre of a power struggle that is likely to define global politics for decades to come.

And how it weathers the coming storms will hinge on the election of a new International Olympic Committee (IOC) president on Thursday.

The winner, whoever it is, has never been more important. They will preside over the Olympic Games at a time when its future is more precarious than ever.

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“I believe what the IOC faces is an existential threat,” says Professor Simon Chadwick, one of the world’s leading experts on the business of sport.

The chief agents of that threat? Vladimir Putin, and by extension, Donald Trump.

The i Paper has spoken to experts and sources across sport and beyond about the issues facing outgoing president Thomas Bach’s replacement after 12 years in post.

Their testimony paints a murky picture of a future where power and politics come first, and sport very much second.

The IOC’s secretive voting process will represent a nervous few hours for Sebastian Coe, the former British Olympian and sports administrator, who is among the leading candidates.

“In his own mind, he probably thinks he was born for this role,” says Ed Warner, who was head of UK Athletics for 10 years and worked closely with Coe throughout that time, including during London 2012 and on the bid to host the World Athletics Championships in 2017.

“It will be the culmination of his sports administration career… Although he began as an athlete, he is at heart, and has been for decades now, a sports politician.”

It certainly does feel like the moment up to which Coe’s career has been leading. He is many things to many people: a certain generation fondly recall his middle-distance rivalry with Steve Ovett and his two gold medals in 1980 and 1984; to another, his loss of a Conservative seat in Cornwall was up there with the “Portillo moment” of Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.

Sebastian Coe won 1500m gold at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics (Photo: Getty)

Latterly he became the face of bringing the Olympics back to Britain; and now he is one of the most powerful men in sport thanks to his job at World Athletics. Few people can claim to have had such a varied career.

He is not the only athlete in the running: one of his two main rivals is Kirsty Coventry, Africa’s most decorated Olympian with seven swimming medals – two of which were gold. Now the sports minister in her home country of Zimbabwe, she is the rumoured choice of outgoing president Bach.

But she is only 41 and relatively inexperienced in administrative terms.

“She’s stuck betwixt and between,” one source says. “She is not recent enough an athlete to win the support of athletes, and not retired long enough to have amassed the kind of political heft required for the job. It’s hard to see her winning.”

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And then there is the favourite: Juan Antonio Samaranch. “Baby Samaranch,” some call him, because he shares the name of his father, who spent 20 years as president of the IOC.

Samaranch Jr is not a complete “nepo baby” though; he is the current IOC vice-president and has served on countless sub-committees, but no one doubts that at least some votes for Jr will be cast out of loyalty to Sr.

“Coe has been very good at canvassing for second or third-choice votes,” one source with years of IOC experience says.

“But it is so duplicitous. People will promise votes to whoever is in front of them at the time.”

The intricate politics of the election are only outmatched by the politics of the job itself.

Sport and politics do mix 

“That is naivety personified,” Coe said, when Piers Morgan put to him that politics and sport don’t, and in fact shouldn’t, mix.

“Politics is the stuff of life, sport is the stuff of life. Actually if we’re smart in sport you should be forging even closer political relationships.”

“It’s far better to have people in your sport rather than sitting outside it”.

Lord Sebastian Coe discusses Russia’s future involvement in athletics if a peace deal with Ukraine is found.

Watch the full interview at 3pm (EST) / 8pm (UK).@piersmorgan | @sebcoe pic.twitter.com/Kg5pdcaawV

— Piers Morgan Uncensored (@PiersUncensored) February 20, 2025

He did not seem to the feel the same way when he defied intense personal pressure from Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and competed anyway, winning gold.

It is ironic then that Coe has been the chief thorn in the side of Putin’s attempts to use sport to advance his disruption of the global order.

It was Coe who led Great Britain’s successful bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, beating a bid for Moscow to lead Putin’s regeneration of Russia.

It was Coe who, as head of World Athletics, banned Russia from competing in the sport most central to the Olympic Games, and was seen to lead the charge on the country’s state-sponsored doping regime.

And it was Coe who defied the IOC’s recommendation to find ways for Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete as neutrals at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games after the invasion of Ukraine.

But as so often with Coe, there are two sides to his stance. In the wake of the Russian doping scandal, he founded the Athletics Integrity Unit to try and bring the country into line.

“Had the Russia-Ukraine situation not raised its head, they would have been ready to come back,” Coe said last month. “I would have been actually quite pleased with that because we’d been through the process.”

Sebastian Coe is one the contenders for the IOC presidency (Photo: Getty)

Process is a word he has leaned hard on in this campaign, trying to paint himself as the arch-technocrat, perhaps because in the hyper-conservative IOC, Coe has previously ruffled more than a few feathers by being prepared to speak his mind.

“He’s giving everybody a reason to think he’s a good guy,” Warner says. “And it’s an obvious tactic, but it’s a smart one. He’s adopted a very deliberate tactic of being very middle of the road, very consensual, open to a broad church. I think the tactic is not to alienate anybody.”

And that includes Putin, the man who poses such a serious threat to the Olympic Games.

“My view is that the doping scandal was more about disrupting the organisation [the IOC] than it was about enhancing performance,” Chadwick says.

“And the reason for saying this is that we now know that Putin has this concept of a World Friendship Games. We’re led to believe that there are 76 countries who have already indicated they will participate.

“The biggest threat is that, ultimately, maybe China, maybe South Africa, maybe others, alongside Russia, could create a rival to the Olympic movement. It might look like and sound like and smell like the Olympics, but it won’t be the Olympics. The crucial thing is the governing body headquarters won’t be based in Lausanne, and it won’t be governed by a European president.”

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The IOC has already told its members that participating in the World Friendship Games would go “against the Olympic Movement’s collective aim of maintaining the independence and autonomy of sport”.

The inaugural World Friendship Games was supposed to be held just weeks after Paris 2024, but the event’s president – Putin – postponed it to 2025 or possibly 2026.

It seems like a weak move, but shifting sands in the Middle East, an increasingly influential player on the Olympic scene, represent an opportunity.

“Dubai is going to create the world’s first sports free zone,” Chadwick adds, explaining that it would represent the sporting equivalent of a “free port”.

“No tax, no regulation, no scrutiny. And the Emiratis have already said ‘We are looking to attract sports governing bodies to locate here’.

“There are a lot of Russians down in Dubai after the invasion of Ukraine, and the Friendship Games, a Russian creation, might establish its global headquarters in this new free zone: no scrutiny, no reporting, no taxes, no transparency.”

It would be a power play to which the new IOC president, whoever it is, would have to respond, with the choice simple: let Russia back into its Games, or start a fight against a new competitor.

“We’ve just lived through 30 years of globalisation and those rules were very reassuring, because they guaranteed a level of consistency,” Chadwick adds.

“Now, we’re in a completely different era, completely different period in the history of sport.”

The Trump dilemma 

No one has done more to disrupt the direction of global travel over the last 30 years than Donald Trump.

As the man overseeing the next summer Games in Los Angeles, he will add another layer of jeopardy to an already-precarious tightrope walk for the new IOC president.

Since returning to the White House, Trump has distanced himself from his predecessor Joe Biden’s policies of support in Ukraine, suspending military aid and imploring Volodymyr Zelensky to sue for peace, while also engaging with Putin more than any other major Western leader has during the war.

Trump even called Zelensky a “dictator” at one point, before holding direct talks with the Russian president, who has effectively ruled for 25 years, over the phone.

Ending this war, the US president hopes, will be part of the legacy of his second term the White House, as well as LA 2028, which will be his swansong.

“Where we’re heading to right now with sport is rather than a rules-based global sporting order, we’re heading towards a deals-based global sporting order,” Chadwick says.

“And certainly when Coe or whoever else finds themselves in their first meeting with Trump, he isn’t going to be interested in their rules. He’s going to be interested in what deals you can strike.”

He adds: “So the harsh reality for the new IOC president is that you might want to be a fine, upstanding, moral individual who sticks to the rules, but the reality of 21st century geopolitics is that deals are more significant than rules.”

The rules that the IOC president will have to contend with are those by which Russia was banned in the first place.

But Trump will doubtless want the LA Games to be a celebration of his diplomatic genius, with Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian athletes competing alongside each other, watched on by the outgoing American president, his successor and the readmitted Putin, scenes unthinkable even a year ago.

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“We would head into 2028 with Putin seeking to assert Russian power alongside Trump positioning the Republican Party for a second term in office,” Chadwick says.

Does the IOC really want to cause an international incident and start what Trump will certainly make a public dispute over the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes?

Does the IOC want to be an outlier if the world agrees and acknowledges that a US-brokered peace in Ukraine is the lasting solution?

“I think the history of the IOC is it does what it wants to do, and Thomas Bach, when pressured to explain himself, has often been absent. He’s spoken when he’s fancied speaking,” Warner says.

“The IOC can almost just shut up and let the politicians squirm, and it’ll just be a part of an uneasy downing of weapons. There’ll be a downing of sports weapons, if you like.

“And who are the IOC to try and extend the punishment of Russia? The leader of the free world has deemed [Russia] to be an acceptable negotiating partner.

“It might feel incredibly unsavoury, but I just don’t see the IOC standing against geopolitics.”

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