MOSCOW, August 7. /TASS/. A representative of the Global South should replace the current president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Thomas Bach, in order to bring the Olympic Movement back to its roots envisaged by the Olympic Charter, Russian Sports Minister Mikhail Degtyarev told TASS on Wednesday.
"Unfortunately, Thomas Bach, with his recent decisions, his influence on the Olympic Movement and his Russophobic approach, has fallen out of favor with us, no longer among those that we can wish success to," Degtyarev said.
"That is why, if we speak about the future of the Olympic Movement in a broad sense, I believe that it is time for a representative from the Global South to take up the flag of the Olympic Movement and bring it back to the values of the Olympic Charter that we all share," the Russian minister noted.
Thomas Bach, an Olympic fencing gold medalist from Germany, was elected president of the IOC in 2013 at the 125th IOC session in Buenos Aires for a term of eight years.
Bach, 70, won his Olympic gold in the team foil competition at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal. After serving his initial eight-year term as IOC president, he ran for another four-year term in the 2021 elections, where he was the sole candidate and was ultimately re-elected.
At the 141st IOC Session in India’s Mumbai last October some IOC members floated the idea of amending the Olympic Charter so that Bach could be re-elected for yet another term as president of the global organization.
Russian Sports Minister Degtyarev also told TASS that the global level of spectators’ focus on the present-day Olympics was on the decline because athletes from Russia and Belarus were barred from the competitions and it had a direct impact on the sponsorship deals.
"The level of competitions, all [athletic] results and the audience’s likely sympathies and attention are downgraded without the participation of our [Russian] athletes and athletes from Belarus, the cash-boxes are also on the decline," he said.
"Many people say that tickets for the Paris Games were overbooked. Yes, indeed. But there are also sponsorship contracts that shrink in their in volume," the minister said.
"There is currently a number of sponsors, who cancelled their IOC support and cut broadcasting on key platforms. That is a hard fact. All of this is the result of the Russophobe stance," the Russian sports minister added.
The 2024 Summer Olympic Games are hosted by the French capital of Paris between July 26 and August 11.
IOC’s regulations against Russia
The International Olympic Committee Executive Board convened for a meeting at the Olympic House in Lausanne, Switzerland, on March 19-20 and following the opening day it decided to bar athletes from Russia and Belarus from taking part in the Parade of Athletes and also exclude them from the 2024 Olympics overall medal standings.
The IOC, however, ruled that Russian athletes, cleared to participate in the upcoming Olympics, would not have to sign anything denouncing their country’s special military operation in Ukraine.
On October 12, 2023, the IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC) until further notice after the Russian organization included the Olympic councils of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions as its members.
The Swiss-based CAS registered on November 6, 2023 an appeal from the ROC against the IOC’s decision on the Russian governing Olympic body’s suspension.
The suspension means that the ROC cannot act as a national Olympic committee or receive financing from the Olympic movement. The IOC however reserved the right to clear Russian athletes to take part in the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024 as neutrals. Later, IOC President Thomas Bach said that Russian athletes should have no affiliation with the ROC if they want to compete at the Olympic Games.