The time has come for Thomas Bach to fade into the sunset. After eleven years as president of the International Olympic Committee, it already feels as though this consummate bureaucrat from Lausanne, who loves nothing more than posing as a head of state, has been at it longer than he should have. The world governing body he heads has simply shown at these Paris Games that it is not up to its task. To each scandalous story that has come to its doorstep, its response has followed the same pattern: dodge, deny, divert attention.
Why did he allow Steven van de Velde, a convicted child rapist, to compete in beach volleyball for the Netherlands? “Ask the Dutch National Olympic Committee.” Why did he allow a second child sex offender, Australian Brett Sutton, to coach the women’s triathlon silver medallist for China? “Ask the Chinese NOC.” And why on earth did he allow Two biological males will win Olympic gold medals in women’s boxing“These athletes are women,” Bach repeatedly obstructed, even as, almost simultaneously, he adopted the absurd stance that womanhood could not be definitively proven by science.
The latest of these firestorms is the one that has really set the house on fire. If the world’s most powerful sporting organisation cannot guarantee even basic safety for women when they compete, let alone fairness, what good is it? The IOC had one task, having taken over Olympic boxing for political reasons: to look at the immutable truths of biology and ensure that women were not needlessly thrown into dangerous situations against opponents whose sex tests had shown XY chromosomes.
And she has failed abysmally. The image of Poland’s Julia Szeremeta, her face stained with blood after losing in the gold medal match to Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, will live long in the memory. So will the tears of Italy’s Angela Carini, who said after losing to Algeria’s Imane Khelif that The blows he received were so strong that he feared for his life.. And so will the resonant gesture of two of the other boxers defeated by Lin: a double tap with their wrists in the shape of an X, reminding the IOC that, if clean sport is to mean anything, women’s sport must be for XX only.
The IOC has said that the results of tests Khelif and Lin have previously taken are unreliable. Yet it seems that Bach is unfortunately too enthralled by gender ideology to notice. But Lord Coe, who is already in early manoeuvres to succeed the German as president, is different. As head of World Athletics, he has made defending the integrity of the women’s category his priority. He knew he could not risk a repeat of Rio 2016, where three runners with differences of sexual development (DSD) knocked biological women off the podium in the women’s 800m. So last year he decided to introduce a policy that athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD) could only compete in women’s events if they had substantially reduced their testosterone.
The policy is not perfect, given the countless studies illustrating that suppressing testosterone can never truly eliminate the male advantage. But it is far better than anything the IOC has created through its genuflection to lobbyists who believe that all it takes to be a woman is to show an “F” on your passport. Coe, at least, conveys the impression that she cares about women having a level playing field. “I have daughters, what do you think I think about that?” she said during these Olympics, describing the disaster that engulfed boxing. If clearer boundaries between men’s and women’s competition were not delineated, “no woman,” she argued, “would ever win a sporting event again.”
Coe gave an equally blunt response when I asked if he considered the boxing maelstrom a failure of IOC leadership. “You have to have a clear policy,” Coe said. “If you don’t have that, you’re in a difficult position. And I think that’s what we’ve seen here. This isn’t just a ‘nice to have.’ You have to put a flag in the ground. You’re never going to satisfy everybody. I always try, whenever possible, to express my own language as if it were a member of my family.”
“But I was elected to serve a mandate, and part of that mandate is to be absolutely clear about women’s sport. For me, this is a very important issue. The reality is very simple: I have a responsibility to preserve women’s sport and I will continue to do so until a successor decides otherwise or the science changes.”
Coe willing to seek justice
Where Coe differs from Bach is that he is not afraid to temporarily lose his popularity in order to champion a just cause. He understood that if the central principles of biology could not be upheld in athletics, often called the “mother of all sports” for its simplicity of seeing who can run the fastest and jump the highest, then he was failing in his duty of care.
This idea seems not to have even occurred to Bach, so preoccupied with trying to shore up his power base that he seems to have accepted patently flawed schools of thought. Like Avery Brundage, who clung to the presidency for 20 years, and Juan Antonio Samaranch, who did so for 21, he has lasted far too long. Coe will undoubtedly face a crowded field of rivals if he decides to stand. But after the IOC’s woeful neglect of a fundamental issue, He is the only candidate who can restore some crucial common sense..