Even at 68, Lord Coe sticks scrupulously to his habit of starting his day with a run. Whether on the treadmill or the road, he has an almost military devotion to racking up 40 miles per week.
On the morning of his formal pitch in January to become president of the International Olympic Committee, he invited a few journalists to join him and his son Harry on a gentle jog through Lausanne’s old town at dawn. “Big day for your dad,” I muttered to Harry, breathlessly, as Coe Snr kept up a clip befitting a double Olympic 1500m champion. “Another day, another speech,” he smiled.
Amid the machinations of a complex six-month campaign, Coe was in his element. The greater the prize, the harder he grafts. And his efforts to grasp the one job he coveted above all others were, by any standard, remorseless. He criss-crossed the globe in pursuit of any and every vote, flitting between Budapest, Dubai and Mumbai, while even finding time to put in a headline-grabbing appearance at the Oscars. If he could survive a year in the whip’s office of John Major’s moribund minority government, then he was sure he could navigate a way through the IOC’s nest of vipers. Nobody, he believed, better understood the vagaries of human nature.
Except Coe was mistaken. In 72 hours here at Costa Navarino, the IOC’s sumptuous retreat on Greece’s Ionian coast, he came face-to-face with the true Machiavellian character of this most fiercely protective of private clubs. Until the last moment, his bid team expressed confidence that he was making progress, only for half a year’s work to unravel in two minutes. Thomas Bach’s stunning announcement that his successor had been found on the first ballot of an election expected to last multiple rounds meant just one thing: that Kirsty Coventry, the outgoing president’s preferred successor, had prevailed.
The publication of the vote breakdown 30 minutes later brought home the full horror, showing a mere eight votes for Coe against Coventry’s 49. All those promises of support he had chased? Too many, ultimately, turned out to be empty. Coe, for the first time in his career, had found himself outmanoeuvred, humiliated by the cold, hard, ruthless politics of Bach, his long-time nemesis.
Bach’s style is that of a benevolent dictator, his iron fist concealed in a velvet glove. While he insisted he had no favourite, everybody knew this was a masquerade, with the 41-year-old Coventry nurtured so assiduously for the role of president-elect that she had been sent to address the United Nations. As the clock ticked down, there was a twin imperative at the highest level: to make sure that she succeeded, and that Coe was thwarted.
Differences between behemoths run deep
Tensions between Bach and Coe have run deep for decades. They first came into contact in 1981, when appointed by Juan Antonio Samaranch to the first IOC athletes’ commission, jokingly calling each other Goethe and Shakespeare. As leaders, their paths could hardly have diverged more sharply. Where Bach has been indulgent of Vladimir Putin, contriving ways to readmit Russian athletes into the Olympic fold after both a state-sponsored doping scandal and the invasion of Ukraine, Coe has refused to compromise at World Athletics, imposing a blanket ban at last summer’s Paris Games. And where Bach has been captured by the full absurdity of gender ideology, arguing that an ‘F’ in a passport is enough to be accepted as a woman in elite sport, Coe has sought to restrict the female category to those who are biologically female.
As the election approached, this fissure erupted into the open. A letter sent to the IOC membership last September by the ethics committee stated that no future president could remain as leader of an international federation. Given Coe’s third and final term in charge of World Athletics would not end until 2027, rumours began to circulate that his candidacy was being sabotaged by Bach. The German always maintained the process was above board. Coe also scarcely helped his cause by launching a surprise move to reward Olympic champions in track and field with $50,000 (£39,000) cash bonuses. Bach fiercely disapproved, claiming that the scheme would only deepen inequalities between athletes and nations. He was similarly unhappy at the fact he had not been consulted.
These disputes laid the ground for a fraught election, where Bach’s mission appeared to be broadly defined as “Get Kirsty”. The concerted lobbying in Greece was brutally effective. It is understood that on the eve of the vote, Coventry, Bach’s chosen one, had already amassed 48 committed backers, one shy of an outright majority. “You have to think, ‘What do you want?’” said Israeli member Yael Arad. “Conservative or liberal? Young or less young? Kirsty being a woman was not the main reason people supported her, it was only part of the puzzle. I can tell you that until the very last days, many people were thinking, ‘What? Where? How?’ Eventually, I think the momentum of many of us created this big victory.”
It was crucial that Coventry obtained the 49th vote by whatever means possible. Any fewer and the election would spill over into a second, third or fourth round, with once guaranteed loyalists switching their preferences. “I was expecting a lot of people to vote for her and I hoped it would be the first round, because then it gets icky if it’s not,” said the United States’ Anita DeFrantz, the third longest-serving IOC member. “People start changing their votes and you can’t keep up with what’s happening.” DeFrantz, 72, had played her part in ensuring there was no such jeopardy, travelling to Costa Navarino to support Coventry despite being seriously ill with cancer and multiple sclerosis.
Plus, there were some telling shifts in allegiance. Nawal El Moutawakel of Morocco should, by rights, have been a surefire recruit to Team Seb. Besides sharing the stage with him at the Los Angeles Games in 1984, becoming the first African woman to win Olympic gold, she has served on the council of World Athletics, the organisation he leads, since 1995. But immediately after Coventry’s triumph was confirmed, El Moutawakel was pictured holding up the Zimbabwean’s hand in jubilation. The impression was that even some of Coe’s closest associates had deserted him.
Coventry, just to add to the intrigue, did not seem especially overwhelmed that she had won. She looked as if she had been elected to a parish council, rather than to the most influential sporting office in the world. Had she known all along that her success was a fait accompli? That is difficult to say. But it was striking to hear the emotion in her voice as she thanked DeFrantz at her press conference. Without the American moving heaven and earth to be present for the vote, this election could have turned out very differently.
A humiliating outcome
Coe was magnanimous in defeat, immediately walking over to Coventry to congratulate her. He was relieved, he said, that an athlete had won. But these were two athletes diametrically opposed in their philosophies and world views. Where Coe has stood squarely behind his policies in athletics, Coventry has been a relative milquetoast, seldom engaging with controversial issues for fear of contradicting Bach. Extraordinarily, two of the world leaders quick to congratulate her were Putin and Belarus’ Aleksander Lukashenko, the very men Coe has been at pains to alienate on the international stage.
In a personal sense, this was a humiliating outcome for Coe. He had earned his reputation as a serial winner, whether through his two Olympic golds or his stewardship of the London Games. But the IOC’s top table was one cartel he could not gatecrash. All his accumulated wisdom counted for nothing against all the last-minute manoeuvres and backroom plots that only an institution of this secrecy could hatch.
One of the IOC’s final decisions here was to host their session in 2027 in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic, a palm-fringed resort every bit as luxurious as Costa Navarino. It was one more small signal that the membership, stuffed with superannuated bureaucrats and European nobility, preferred the status quo: the lavish per diems, the exotic travel, the endless gravy train. Why would they want somebody promising profound change? Viewing Coe as the disruptor, they plumped instead for the candidate who would keep their sinecures intact.
It was a long and lonely journey that confronted Coe as he left Greece for the world indoor athletics championships in China. He had channelled all his energies into the fulfilment of this dream and emerged with only four more votes than Morinari Watanabe, the eccentric Japanese candidate who had wanted to turn the Olympics into a 24-hour jamboree across five continents. This result was a scalding repudiation of his vision. But it was also a reflection of Bach’s determination to crush his old adversary. The bitter reckoning is that while Coe was convinced he had momentum, the established forces aligned to make sure he did not even have a chance.
