The time is right for Thomas Bach to disappear 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 better than to posture as a head of state, has outstayed his welcome. Quite simply, the global governing body he leads has revealed itself at these Paris Games as unfit for purpose. For every one of the scandalous storylines that has landed at its door, its response has followed the same pattern: dodge, deny, deflect.
Why did it 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 it let a second child sex offender, Australia’s Brett Sutton, coach the women’s triathlon silver medallist for China? “Ask the Chinese NOC.” And why on earth did it permit two biological males to win Olympic gold medals in women’s boxing? “These athletes are women,” Bach stonewalled, again and again – even when, almost in the same breath, he took the absurd position that womanhood could not be definitively proved by science.
It is the last of these firestorms that has truly burned the house down. If the world’s most potent sporting organisation cannot guarantee even basic safety for women when they are competing, never mind fairness, then what is it for? The IOC had one job, having assumed control of Olympic boxing for political reasons: to observe the immutable truths of biology and ensure that women would not be thrown needlessly into harm’s way against opponents whose sex tests had shown XY chromosomes.
And it has failed, abysmally. The image of Poland’s Julia Szeremeta, her face smeared with blood after defeat in the gold-medal bout by Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan, will live long in the memory. So, too, will the tears of Italy’s Angela Carini, who said, on losing to Imane Khelif of Algeria, that the punches she absorbed were so hard that she feared for her life. And so will the resonant gesture by two of the other boxers vanquished by Lin: a double tap with their wrists in the shape of an X, reminding the IOC that if fair sport is to mean anything, women’s sport needs to be XX-only.
The IOC has said the results of the tests Khelif and Lin previously took are unreliable. Even so, its seems Bach, sadly, is too in thrall to gender ideology to notice. But Lord Coe, already on early manoeuvres to succeed the German as president, is different. As leader 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, where three runners with differences in sexual development (DSD) knocked biological females off the podium in the women’s 800 metres. As such he decided last year to establish a policy where DSD athletes could only enter women’s events if they had substantially reduced their testosterone.
The policy is not perfect, given the myriad studies illustrating that testosterone suppression can never truly eliminate male advantage. But it is leagues better than anything the IOC has created through its genuflection to lobbyists who believe that all you need to be a woman is to show an ‘F’ on your passport. Coe, at the very least, conveys the impression that he cares about women having a level playing field. “I have daughters, how do you think I feel about this?” he said during these Olympics, describing the binfire engulfing boxing. If you did not delineate the clearest boundaries between male and female competition, “no woman” he argued, “would ever win a sporting event again”.
He gave a similarly robust reply when I asked him here if he regarded the boxing maelstrom as a failure of IOC leadership. “You have to have a clear policy,” Coe said. “If you don’t, you get into difficult territory. And I think that’s what we’ve witnessed here. This isn’t just a ‘nice to have’. You have to put a flagpole in the ground. You’re never going to satisfy everybody. I always try, where possible, to couch my own language as if it were a member of my family being discussed.
“But I am elected to deliver a mandate, and part of that is to be absolutely unambiguous about women’s sport. For me, this is a really important issue. The reality is very simple: I have a responsibility to preserve the female category, and I will go on doing that until a successor decides otherwise or the science alters.”
Coe prepared to pursue justice
Where Coe can be distinguished from Bach is in the fact that he is not afraid of a temporary loss of popularity in order to pursue a just cause. He understood that if the central tenets of biology could not be upheld in athletics, often called the “mother of all sports” for the sheer simplicity of seeing who can run fastest and jump highest, then he was abrogating his duty of care.
This idea appears not even to have occurred to Bach, so preoccupied with trying to shore up his power base that he appears to have acquiesced to patently flawed schools of thought. Like Avery Brundage, who clung on to the presidency for 20 years, and Juan Antonio Samaranch, who did so for 21, he has gone on for far too long. Coe will doubtless face a crowded field of rivals if he decides to run. But after the IOC’s pitiful negligence on a fundamental issue, he is the only candidate who can restore some crucial common sense.
