From Olympic Administration to Olympic Governance

Emmanuel Bayle, Jean-Loup Chappelet, Emmanuel Bayle, Jean-Loup Chappelet

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367234119
• eBook ISBN: 9781351718004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Lausanne, the Swiss city IOC (International Olympic Committee) President Juan Antonio Samaranch honored with the title "Olympic capital" in 1994, is now the administrative capital of world sport. The past century has presented Olympism with many challenges and that continues to be the case today; the issues may have changed, but they are no less numerous. Controversies over phony amateurism, the two Chinas and the creation of a modern Olympia have been resolved, only to be replaced by questions of governance, compliance, strategy, responsible management, the size of the Games, the scarcity of bids and new forms of doping and corruption. All these themes are examined in the articles that make up this book published about 100 years after the establishment of the IOC's headquarters in Lausanne. This book was originally published as a special edition of Sport in Society.

From Olympic administration to Olympic governance: challenges for our century

Jean-Loup Chappelet^a and Emmanuel Bayle^b

^aBâtiment IDHEAP, UNIL, Lausanne, Switzerland; ^bBâtiment Géopolis, UNIL, Lausanne, Switzerland

This volume commemorating the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) headquarters in Lausanne draws on the papers read at a symposium held to mark the occasion at the University of Lausanne on 25 and 26 June 2015.¹ As well as being home to the IOC for the last 100 years, the city Juan Antonio Samaranch hono u red with the title ‘Olympic capital’ is now the administrative capital of world sport. The past century has presented Olympism with many challenges and that continues to be the case today; the issues may have changed, but they are no less numerous. Controversies over phony amateurism and the creation of a modern Olympia have been resolved, only to be replaced by questions of governance, strategy, responsible management, the size of the Games, the scarcity of bids and new forms of doping. All these themes are examined in the articles that make up this volume.

Jean-Loup Chappelet opens the proceedings with an overview of how Olympic administration has evolved since the IOC set up its headquarters in Lausanne, in 1915. At the time, the IOC was a very small organization with a small number of stakeholders, who were, themselves, mostly embryonic. Today, Olympism involves more than 20 stakeholders who interact within a complex system. As a result, the IOC can no longer merely administer Olympism, as it did a century ago, it must govern the Olympic System as a network.

John J. MacAloon helped shape the governance reforms introduced by the IOC in 1999. He now turns the spotlight on one of the main challenges facing the Olympic Movement following the adoption of the Agenda 2020 strategic road map, that is, the scarcity of Olympic bids from Western countries and the emergence of candidatures from less democratic countries. He discusses the IOC’s attribution of the 2022 Winter Games in the light of this new context.

As it is now impossible to manage governmental or non-governmental organizations without taking into account human rights and the environment, Olympic social responsibility will be a major issue for Olympism over the coming years. Emmanuel Bayle draws on interviews with senior figures in the sporting world in order to suggest ways in which the IOC and other Olympic stakeholders can implement social responsibility and thereby enable the IOC to pursue its eternal raison d’être of placing sport at the service of humanity.

Richard W. Pound, Canada’s eminent IOC member, addresses the issue of the size of the Games in an Olympic System centred round them. He points out that this volume is nothing new, but that it now also affects the Winter Olympics. He shows that the growth of the Games during Killanin’s and Samaranch’s presidencies was accompanied by a concomitant increase in the IOC’s power over the organization of the Games and ever closer supervision of their organizing committees (OCOG).

Nevertheless, models for organizing and governing the Olympic Games differ from host country to host country. Milena M. Parent describes the Olympic models used for Calgary 1988 and Vancouver 2010, two particularly successful editions of the Winter Games held in Canada. These models are based on a strong OCOG capable of directly supervising the construction of sports facilities and the necessary infrastructure (without delegating to other bodies) while working closely with the city, provincial and national authorities.

Kostas Georgiadis and Panagiotis Theodorikakos examine the impact of the 2004 Athens Olympics. They attempt to determine whether these Games were economically justifiable for Greece and whether they left a positive legacy for the city and the Olympic Movement according to the Greeks consulted by poll 10 years after the event.

Joël Pinson brings us back to the ‘Olympic Capital’ with an assessment of Lausanne’s desire to host the Games, at first by providing a permanent home for the Games as a ‘modern Olympia’, an idea that dates back more than 100 years to Pierre de Coubertin, and then through bids for the Summer Olympics, up to 1960, and for the Winter Games in 1994. Lausanne’s dream finally came true in July 2015, a month after the symposium that gave rise to this volume, when the city was awarded the 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games.

Finally, Otto Schantz looks at the consequences of the Olympics’ and international sport’s overriding emphasis on performance, as symbolized by the Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius, to the detriment of the educational ideal of the harmonious development of the human being. The author predicts that the emergence of new technologies will lead to the development of cyborg athletes, thereby consigning the issue of doping to history, as has happened to the question of amateurism.

Jean-Loup Chappelet closes the issue with a brief postface in which he categorizes the types of governance applicable to the various Olympic organizations. The success with which these highly diverse organizations have implemented governance reforms might depend on the category to which they belong.

Note

  1. The programme and presentations of the conference can be consulted at: www.unil.ch/idheap/symposium

From Olympic administration to Olympic governance

Jean-Loup Chappelet

Swiss Graduate School of Public Administration (IDHEAP), University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

ABSTRACT

This articles describes three models which played a key role in the evolution of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and all the organizations which contribute to the staging of the Olympic Games and constitute the Olympic System, from its beginnings in 1894 to the present day. This evolution and the addition of many stakeholders has increased the complexity of the management of the Olympic System over the years from pure Olympic administration (when the IOC headquarters moved to Lausanne in 1915) to Olympic network governance which must take into consideration more than 24 types of stakeholders, including goverments and intergovernmental organizations.

When the International Olympic Committee (IOC) moved its headquarters and archives to Lausanne (Switzerland), on 15 April 1915 (Gilliéron 1993), it was a small organization with no employees. At the time, it was still being run by Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games. Created in 1894, one of the IOC’s original tasks was to choose, every four years, the cities that would host the Games. In just over a century, it has grown into an important non-governmental organization (NGO) at the centre of a network of more or less closely connected bodies that contribute to the staging of the Olympics. The IOC now employs more than 500 people in Lausanne and, according to the fundamental principles laid down in the Olympic Charter, it does much more than attribute the Games.

Of course, the huge expansion of the IOC – and of the bodies connected with it – has been accompanied by equally large changes in the way the organization is managed. In short, it has moved from a relatively traditional form of administration without staff, a sort of club of co-opted and unpaid natural persons, which it still is according to the IOC’s statutes, to a form of governance that has to take into account a diverse network of stakeholders who began exerting their influence during the last century and who, since the 1980s, have enjoyed substantial financial resources. (The present article follows Freeman’s (1984) definition of a stakeholder in an organization as ‘any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives’.) These new stakeholders affect the management of the IOC, which must ensure its partners’ strategies and operations are aligned with its own.

The present article traces the emergence of each of these stakeholders and analyses the managerial consequences for the system they form. It also examines the resulting repercussions for Olympic governance as a whole, taking into account the recent evolution of the Olympic phenomenon and the challenges it faces today. The history of Olympic administration can be divided into three periods on the basis of stakeholder assertiveness. The first three sections of this article describe these three periods, from the development of the ‘classic’ Olympic System’s five main stakeholders (central core) to the construction of the ‘regulated’ Olympic System at the end of the twentieth century and the emergence of the ‘total’ Olympic System, which includes ever more stakeholders, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A fourth section discusses the consequences of the increasing complexity of the Olympic System in terms of its management and governance. The conclusion summarizes these findings and compares the traditional notion of Olympic Movement with the twenty-first-century Olympic System.

The classic Olympic System

Staging the Olympic Games involves five main stakeholders: the IOC, (local) Organizing Committees for the Olympic Games (OCOGs), National Olympic Committees (NOCs), International Sport Federations (IFs) and National Sport Federations (NFs). These five parties (like the five interlinked rings invented by Coubertin but completely unrelated to the five stakeholders) vary greatly in size and importance depending on the sport, the country and the era. The following paragraphs provide a brief overview of how they evolved during the previous century.

The growth of the Olympic Games has gradually enabled the IOC to become a very powerful organization, but it was not until the 1980s, after a period of boycotts (1972–1984) and under the presidency of Juan Antonio Samaranch (Chappelet 2014), that the IOC rose to the head of what it calls the ‘Olympic Movement’. Hence, the IOC is now the dominant body in a movement that Fundamental Principle 3 of the 2014 Olympic Charter defines as ‘the concerted, organised, universal and permanent action, carried out under the supreme authority of the IOC, of all individuals and entities who are inspired by the values of Olympism’. In 1999, following a major corruption scandal involving some of its members (Wenn, Barney, and Martyn 2011), the IOC was forced to make a number of structural reforms (MacAloon 2011), including the introduction of members proposed by three of its main stakeholders (up to 15 members for each stakeholder): the IFs, the NOCs and active athletes (who are competing/have competed in current or most recent Olympic Games and who are elected by their peers). Once co-opted into the IOC, these members, just like the 70 (maximum) individually co-opted members, undertake to represent the interests of the IOC, rather than those of their original body (Olympic Charter 2014, article 16.1.3 and 16.1.4), even if this is difficult to check. The IOC’s power is also financial, as it has attracted substantial revenues over recent Olympiads (US$ 5 billion for 2009–2012 – IOC 2014b). At the end of 2014, the IOC unanimously adopted its ‘Agenda 2020’, which lays down the 40 (20 + 20) strategic objectives of the committee’s new president, Thomas Bach, elected the previous year (IOC 2014a).

OCOGs have existed under a variety of appellations from the very first edition of the modern Olympic Games, in 1896. Since then, the Games have taken place every four years, except in 1916, 1940 and 1944 because of the two world wars. OCOGs were all powerful until the 1970s, when the IOC began to receive a proportion of the broadcasting rights for the Games, thereby gaining a degree of autonomy. However, it was not until 1992 that the IOC took full control over broadcasting and sponsoring rights and began distributing a proportion of these rights to the OCOGs (US$ 1070 million for London 2012 – IOC 2014b). Following the significant profits made by the 1984 Los Angeles Games, organized by a ‘private OCOG’ in the form of a limited company with no public contribution or guarantees, the OCOG for the 1996 Atlanta Games, also in the United States, adopted a similar model and restricted local, regional and federal government involvement in organizing the Games. But all the Games held since the 1970s, even Atlanta 1996, have involved ever-greater contributions, both financial and logistic, from the public authorities. As a result, since the early 2000s, OCOGs have often had to work alongside other bodies created to look after certain strategic domains (transport, security, new sport facilities). In 2007, former Olympic cities gathered in Lausanne to launch the World Union of Olympic Cities (UMVO) with the aim of enabling host cities to share the expertise and experience accumulated by their OCOGs and communities, and thereby reduce the cost of staging future editions of the Games. This would also allow former host cities to continue benefiting from their Olympic legacy. By 2015, the organization had 30 members and was recognized by the IOC. Nevertheless, the number of cities interested in bidding for the Games fell massively at the beginning of the twenty-first century (see the article by John MacAloon in this special issue), greatly restricting the IOC’s choices, particularly for the Winter Olympics (three candidates for 2018, two candidates for 2022) and the Youth Olympic Games, which were created in 2007 (one candidate for 2016 and two candidates for 2020).

NOCs are responsible for selecting and managing the Olympic team that will represent their country or their territory (which may not be recognized by the UN). NOCs also represent the IOC and promote Olympism in their country. The first NOCs were set...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 From Olympic administration to Olympic governance: challenges for our century
• 2 From Olympic administration to Olympic governance
• 3 Olympic social responsibility: a challenge for the future
• 4 Agenda 2020 and the Olympic Movement
• 5 The management of big games: an introduction
• 6 The governance of the Olympic Games in Canada
• 7 The Olympic Games of Athens: 10 years later
• 8 From the Olympic dream to a down to earth approach: Lausanne’s sports events hosting strategy
• 9 Coubertin’s humanism facing post-humanism – implications for the future of the Olympic Games
• 10 Which governance for which organization? A postface
• Index