The calm of its arteries and the tranquility of its lake can be deceptive. In Lausanne, over the next two days, there will be fever and agitation in the cozy corridors of the IOC headquarters. The six candidates to succeed Jacques Rogge in the presidential chair, as well as the three cities competing for the 2020 Summer Games, will take their grand oral exam, two months before the elections in Buenos Aires.
The extraordinary session of the IOC, scheduled for July 3 and 4, promises to be relentless. At the opening, a presentation of the files of Istanbul, Madrid and Tokyo, the three finalists for the organization of the 2020 Summer Games. Their respective teams are already experienced in the subtle art of the campaign, having repeated their exercise in front of the executive commission on May 30 in Saint Petersburg, then in front of the 200 national Olympic committees on June 15 in Lausanne. But, this time, the obstacle promises to be even more decisive since their audience will be made up of voters in the elective General Assembly on September 7 in Buenos Aires.
Without predicting the outcome of the debates, and the question/answer session scheduled for the next day, we can imagine that Tokyo will once again play the economic and political security card, of a candidacy made for athletes, and the compactness of sites, most of which have already been built. Classic, in every sense of the word. No surprises, neither good nor bad.
Madrid, for its part, will repeat like a refrain the conclusions of the evaluation commission, namely that Spain's current economic difficulties will have little influence on an Olympic event organized in seven long years.
Finally, Istanbul will have to work to repair the damage caused to its candidacy by the wave of protests which shook Turkey in June. His team will also have to convince the members of the IOC that the risk of “congestion” pointed out by the evaluation commission in its technical report will no longer weigh very heavily at the time of the Games.
The other battle, equally furious and indecisive, pits the six candidates for the presidency of the IOC against each other. At the end of the extraordinary session, Thursday July 4, the German Thomas Bach, the Ukrainian Sergey Bubka, the Puerto Rican Richard Carrion, the Singaporean Ser Miang Ng, the Swiss Denis Oswald and the Taiwanese Ching-Kuo Wu will parade to the rostrum to present orally, for the first time in front of their peers, their vision of the future of the Olympic movement.
The exercise will be done behind closed doors. It could, it is said, make it possible to redistribute the cards between the six contenders, who are subject to very strict campaign rules until the election on September 10 in the Argentine capital.
On the agenda for these two long days, two other highlights: the election of the host city of the Summer Youth Olympic Games in 2018, a three-way battle between Glasgow (Scotland), Medellin (Colombia), and Buenos Aires (Argentina). And, finally, the official induction of the four new members, all athletes, elected during the London Games: the French Tony Estanguet, the Slovak Danka Bartekova, the Australian James Tomkins and the Zimbabwean Kirsty Coventry. Phew!
Photo Credit Lausanne Olympic Capital
