The exercise has become ritual. It was never intended to reverse the course of history, but it often has a few surprises in store.
The IOC revealed, Wednesday May 15, the composition of its numerous commissions for the year 2019. There are 27 of them.
Their respective numbers appear to be very disparate, especially in number. The most confidential, devoted to finances, has only four members. It seems that the subject remains too hermetic to be shared. For some others, there will be nearly forty competing for chairs in the meeting room.
Generalities, first. Thomas Bach keeps his promises, engraved in stone in the summary of Agenda 2020: the class of 2019 turns out to be the most feminine and youngest in history.
The IOC has done its accounting: 45,4% of positions within the 27 commissions are occupied by women. A record. Their presence has more than doubled since 2013. Parity is not far away. Another effort.
As a bonus, three new leaders were chosen by the IOC to chair a commission. “ We are very proud to have achieved such high participation of women and young people in a very short time”, welcomes Thomas Bach. The German has a lot to do with it.
Another trend: rejuvenation. Here too, the facts agree with the texts. Under the leadership of its president, the Olympic institution made room for young “Change-Makers”, a network of 280 future decision-makers in the Olympic movement, set up on the occasion of the first Youth Games, organized in 2010 in Singapore. There were only 7 of them last year in the IOC commissions. There are now 16 of them.
Special cases now. Two key positions were to be filled, after the forced withdrawals of the Japanese Tsunekazu Takeda and the Kuwaiti Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah. The first was drawn into the depths by an investigation by French justice into suspicions of corruption in the awarding of the Summer Games to Tokyo in 2020. He is no longer a member of the IOC. The second took a step back and decided to put himself in reserve during a trial in Switzerland on an alleged plot in his native country.
Tsunekazu Takeda was chairman of the marketing commission. To replace him, the IOC chose former Czech rower Jiri Kejval (above). On paper, nothing scandalous. But Jiri Kejval, current president of the Czech Olympic committee, also has an affair in his shadow. He should have joined the IOC during the Lima session in September 2017, but his induction was postponed until the next one, in February 2018 in PyeongChang. At the time of the premiere, he was suspected of corruption in his own country. Cautiously, the IOC asked him to wait.
The replacement of Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahad al-Sabah at the head of the influential Olympic Solidarity Commission has an air of déjà vu. His chair will be occupied by the Fijian Robin Mitchell, who already succeeded him last December, for an interim period, as president of the Association of National Olympic Committees (ANOC).
For the rest, the 2019 vintage includes four new commission presidents: Richard L. Carrión for the Olympic Channel, Mikaela Cojuangco Jaworski for Olympic education, Sari Essayah for sport and active society, and finally Luis Alberto Moreno for business public and social development through sport.
Another winner from the new casting: Nicole Hoevertsz (above). The former synchronized swimmer does not seem handicapped by the modesty of her national Olympic committee, based in Aruba. Elected to a chair last year on the IOC Executive Board, she now gains a new stripe: she will chair the coordination commission for the Los Angeles 2028 Games. The position was initially entrusted to Patrick Baumann, but the Swiss died last October of a cardiac arrest during the Youth Games in Buenos Aires. Incidentally, Nicole Hoevertsz is also moving up a notch on the coordination commission for the Paris 2024 Games, where she will now support the Belgian Pierre-Olivier Beckers as vice-president.
