It sounds like a brain stumper from a particularly fiendish pub quiz. Which major 2025 election is being fought over by several presidents, a vice-president, a prince, a lord, and a politician from Zimbabwe? And, for good measure, could be won for the first time by someone from Britain?
The answer can be found in Lausanne, where the seven candidates hoping to become the next president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) have gathered to make their one and only direct pitch – via a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation – for the biggest job in global sport.
It is also a position that carries significant diplomatic sway. When the current president, Thomas Bach, was elected in 2013, one of the first calls he received was from Vladimir Putin. The IOC was also instrumental in the brief rapprochement between North and South Korea in 2018, when President Trump and Kim Jong-un were trading insults.
But those running – including Lord Sebastian Coe, the former double Olympic champion who brought the 2012 Games to London – face an election so secretive and strange it would make a Vatican cardinal wince. Under IOC rules, for instance, they are banned from holding debates, criticising each other’s policies, or even receiving public endorsements.
However, on Thursday that process gets even more weird as the candidates will make their case to the eclectic electorate of just over 100 IOC members who will decide their fate, including European and Asian royalty and business, sporting and political leaders.
“The presentations will be given in camera and will not be broadcast or webcast on the internet,” the IOC guidelines state bluntly. “Each candidate will have 15 minutes to give their presentation. At the end of their time slot, the microphone will be switched off automatically. There will be no Q&A sessions.”
The rules are designed to make it a fair fight between the candidates before the election in Greece on 20 March. But they also send an unfortunate message: no transparency please, we’re the IOC.
Prince Feisal Al Hussein, the well-respected Jordanian prince who is standing on a platform of bringing east and west together, is one candidate who wishes the world was listening. “Personally I wish there was more transparency and openness,” he says. “If we’re looking at the most powerful job in sport, then the world should understand who the people who are running are. I would prefer that we would present and the whole world would see.”
Lausanne will also be important for another reason: it gives candidates the chance to press the palms of voters and get a sense of their thinking.
However, the secrecy of the process makes it especially difficult to predict the outcome. Journalists, after all, cannot just bump into the Emir of Qatar or Princess Anne to ask who they will vote for. Nor can most candidates.
That said, most observers believe Coe is a serious candidate who has a live shot. To British eyes, he is part of the establishment, having been a Conservative MP, now a lord and the head of the British Olympic Association. But in IOC terms, he is an outsider, having fallen out with Bach over World Athletics’ decision to ban Russia for state-sponsored doping.
That allows Coe to position himself as the candidate who wants to relax Bach’s iron grip on the IOC and bring in reforms and greater democracy. The 68-year-old is also calling for clear policies to protect women’s sport and to get more young people active, arguing that “sport is the most potent social worker in our communities”.
That will play well with many members, but not the Bach loyalists who are likely to gravitate towards Kirsty Coventry, the Zimbabwean sports minister who hopes to be the first woman to get the job and David Lappartient, the French president of cycling’s world body, the UCI.
They both have their chances, although most analysts believe they are behind Coe and Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, the well-regarded IOC vice-president whose father ran the organisation between 1980 and 2001. He is seen as the frontrunner. The two other candidates, Morinari Watanabe, the Japanese president of international gymnastics, and Johan Eliasch, the British-Swedish president of the International Ski and Snowboard Federation, are regarded as major outsiders.
Coe will hope that his extensive political and commercial nous will also be an advantage given the next IOC president will have a brimming in-tray. It includes dealing with Donald Trump before the LA Olympics and handling the fallout in the anti-doping world over the 23 Chinese swimmers who were cleared after failing tests.
Elsewhere there will also be pressure to bring Russia in from the sporting cold, as well as the need to renegotiate television and sponsorship deals totalling billions of dollars. In short, whoever gets the job will have to be a diplomat and dealmaker, chief executive and cheerleader, sometimes on the same day.
But as his 15 minutes approaches, Coe knows he has form for delivering when it matters. In 2005, say, London was regarded as being behind Paris and Madrid in the running for the 2012 Games until the presentations were made and they pushed ahead. In Lausanne on Thursday, Coe will hope to repeat a familiar trick.
