It’s time for Thomas Bach to fade into the sunset. After 11 years as president of the International Olympic Committee, it already feels as if this consummate Lausanne bureaucrat, who loves nothing more than posing as a head of state, has worn out his welcome. Put simply, the global governing body he leads has revealed itself at these Paris Games as unfit for purpose. For each of the scandalous storylines that have landed in his hands, his response has followed the same pattern: evade, deny, deflect.
Why was Steven van de Velde, a convicted child molester, allowed to compete in beach volleyball for the Netherlands? “Ask the Dutch National Olympic Committee.” Why was a second child molester, Australian Brett Sutton, allowed to coach the triathlon silver medalist for China? “Ask the Chinese NOC.” And why on earth were two biological males allowed to win Olympic gold medals in women’s boxing? “These athletes are women,” Bach repeatedly demurred—even as he took the absurd position, almost in the same breath, that being female could not be definitively proven by science.
It is the last of these firestorms that really burned the house down. If the world’s most powerful sporting body can’t guarantee even basic safety for women when they compete, let alone fairness, what is it for? The IOC had one job, after it seized control of Olympic boxing for political reasons: to uphold the immutable truths of biology and ensure that women would not be unnecessarily endangered by opponents whose sex tests showed XY chromosomes.
And it failed, hopelessly. The image of Poland’s Julia Szeremeta, her face smeared with blood after her defeat in the gold medal match against Taiwan’s Lin Yu-ting, will remain etched in the memory for a long time. And the tears of Italy’s Angela Carini, who said, when she lost to Algeria’s Imane Khelif, that the blows she took were so hard that she feared for her life. And the resonant gesture of two of the other boxers Lin defeated: a double tap of their wrists in the shape of an X, to remind the IOC that if fair sport is to mean anything, women’s sport must be XX-only.
The IOC has said that the results of the tests that Khelif and Lin previously took are unreliable. Yet it seems that Bach, unfortunately, is too consumed by gender ideology to notice. But Sebastian Coe, who is already making early moves to succeed the German as president, is different. As head of World Athletics, he has made it his priority to defend the integrity of the women’s category. He knew he could not risk a repeat of Rio 2016, when three runners with differences in sexual development (DSD) knocked biological women off the podium in the women’s 800 meters. So last year he decided to institute a policy that only allowed DSD athletes to compete in women’s events if they had significantly lowered their testosterone levels.
The policy isn’t perfect, given the countless studies showing that testosterone suppression never really eliminates the male advantage. But it’s miles better than anything the IOC has created by bowing to lobbyists who believe that all you need to be a woman is an “F” on your passport. At the very least, Coe gives the impression that he cares about women having a level playing field. “I have daughters, what do you think I think about this?” he said at this Olympics, describing the fire in the trash can that engulfed boxing. Without the clearest possible boundaries between male and female competition, “no woman,” he argued, “would ever win a sporting event again.”
He gave a similarly robust answer when I asked him here whether he saw the boxing maelstrom as a failure of IOC leadership. “You have to have a clear policy,” Coe said. “If you don’t, you’re in difficult territory. And I think that’s what we’ve seen here. This is not just a ‘nice to have’. You have to put a flagpole in the ground. You’re never going to please everybody. I always try, wherever possible, to phrase my own language as if it were a family member being discussed.
“But I was elected to carry out a mandate, and part of that 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 the female category, and I will continue to do so until a successor decides otherwise or the science changes.”
Coe prepares to pursue justice
What sets Coe apart from Bach is that he was not afraid of a temporary loss of popularity to pursue 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 simple contest of seeing who could run fastest and jump highest, he had failed in his duty of care.
The idea doesn’t seem to have even occurred to Bach, who was so preoccupied with trying to shore up his power base that he seems to have succumbed to clearly flawed thinking. Like Avery Brundage, who held on to the presidency for 20 years, and Juan Antonio Samaranch, who held on for 21, he has held on for far too long. Coe will undoubtedly face a crowded field of rivals if he decides to run. But after the IOC’s pathetic failure to act on a fundamental issue, he is the only candidate who can restore some crucial sanity.
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