PARIS, August 9. /TASS/. President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach believes that the election for the presidential post of the Olympic organization’s top post would still be held ‘one way or the other,’ the IOC chief said on Friday.
"In the IOC, my term ends in 2025, there will be elections one way or the other," Bach said speaking at a news conference in Paris.
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.
Athletes from Russia were subjected to a series of sanctions since IOC President Bach took the reign over the IOC.
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.