This promises to a momentous 12 months for Jacques Rogge. But for the President of the International Olympic Committee more or less every year - and conceivably every day - is odds-on to be momentous for one reason or another.
If you’re a sports administrator being IOC President is just about as good as it gets and Rogge relishes the role and is proud of what he’s achieved. But, he says, he would trade it all without a second thought for just one more Games as an Olympian. “Give me the chance to swap eight years as president for one more Games as an athlete and I would take it - there’s no doubt,” he says while acknowledging its impossibility beyond the kind of deal that would have stretched the imaginations of Faust and Beelzebub themselves. “Being President is a surrogate for a passion which you can’t indulge any more. Being an athlete is far superior.”
Critically, he sees the Olympic Movement through the eyes of athletes and is eager to point out that they are playing an increasingly important role within the IOC itself. “The IOC has been characterised and catalogued as being full of being stiff-upper lipped gravy train guys. But people tend to forget that nearly half of all the IOC members have been Olympians. We have many icons of sport in our midst. For me that proves the IOC knows what it is talking about,” he says.
Rogge seeks re-election later this year in the knowledge that the IOC, which has seen its stock rise and fall pretty dramatically over the past 30 years or so, is in pretty good shape.
Despite lingering political concerns in some quarters, last summer’s Beijing Games were a success by just about every measure. “The Games were very good for the Olympic Movement,” he says. “They were truly exceptional in every sense. We had unprecedented level of athletic prowess and flawless, perfection of organisation. They (the Beijing organising Committee) put the athletes at the centre of everything.” Among the brightest lights on the horizon is that radiating from the TV viewing figures from Beijing.
Beyond their sheer scale, there is, says Rogge, clear evidence that the Games managed to connect with a younger age group. The ageing Olympic audience has been an been causing concern in the corridors of power in Lausanne in recent years and this news will have been greeted with a combination of joy and relief. “We have seen an increase in the popularity of the Games and that is a very good sign. I would say that this had strengthened the Olympic Movement and our research shows that perceptions of the Movement improved after the Games and this is something which, naturally, really pleases us.” That data is important for the future games marketing programmes, although for now, contracts are in place up to 2012 and there’s money in the bank. “We are now in the 2010 - 2012 cycle and have contracts worth more than $4.5 billion in place,” says Rogge. But, of course, the world has changed. Selling anything is tougher and sports rights are no exception, as Rogge acknowledges “The financial crisis has hit sport. At local level clubs, National Federations and NOCs are struggling with renewal of contracts, and some ticket sales are becoming sluggish, although as a trend this is contradicted by ticket sales for Vancouver which is three times oversubscribed.” That says, he is confident the currently confirmed Olympic host cities are far enough down the financial road to be able to ride the current financial storm and others that may be brewing.“The budgets of the Organising Committees are under control. I have had assurances from London, Vancouver and Sochi.“
Looking back over Rogge’s first seven and a half years in office, it is possible to identify a number of areas in which the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement have changed. One is the professionalism and intensity of the bidding processes which surrounds the process of being selected to host a Games. “I’m not surprised that the bids are becoming more professional and creative. That is what we wanted,” he says. I spent a long time reflecting with Gilbert Felli, our head of operations, after a rather disappointing Atlanta Games which were not all we wanted them to be. “What struck us was that in Atlanta there was not a good connection between the Organising Committee and the IOC, which has so much more experience of different Games and how they are run. There was no flow of information. “We started to build a system, now known as Olympic games Knowledge Management) where with Monash University (Melbourne) we systematically transfer the knowledge gained form the past to furniture candidate cities and organisers. “We say to the future organiser, these are your Games. You organise them but these are the specifications we expect. We'll you what works and what doesn’t. We don’t want you to reinvent the wheel.”
Today the IOC works with cities from the moment they first express an interest in hosting a Games. “It is in everybody's interest,” says Rogge. “We don't want anybody to waste time on things which don't work and we need to be sure there are no White Elephants. At the beginning of the process there’s often an attitude (among cities) that ‘we’ll show the world.’ Then they realise the complexity of the Games and that they bigger than they thought. For Rogge, the first 2010 Youth Olympic Games are, he says, one part of a solution to a series of global health issues. “It is progressing well although there is still a lot of work to be done, which is only to be expected when you are doing something for the first time.” Around 3,000 youngsters - selected from a pool of maybe 30,000 around the world - will take part in the inaugural Youth Olympic Games and while Rogge acknowledges that isn't a huge number, he believes that by harnessing the Games to the power of new media, it will be possible to build far bigger global communities around youth sport and begin to change attitudes towards participation.
“The idea will be to work through channels including YouTube, Facebook and BeBo to reach kids through media they are immediately comfortable with,” he says. While there's no immediate commercial outlet for Youth Olympic Games content, Olympic Broadcast services – which is responsible for all Games output – will produce daily round-up packages which will be provided free to broadcasters and online channels. That's a clear indication of the IOC's willingness to invest in a project which sites alongside a range of other youth-centred initiatives in China, India and around the world. So as he approaches the end of his first eight years in the IOC hot seat, how does Rogge assess progress to date?
“When I took the job my vision was to focus on the values of the Olympics,” he says. “One of these areas was to do more against doping. It will be an eternal problem but we have made major progress and the IOC is far more credible in terms of doping than before. “Secondly were issues of refereeing and judging. We have worked closely with a lot of Federations including skating, boxing, wrestling and fencing, gymnastic and taekwondo, to develop and introduce computer assisted judging systems. We even froze the funds of the boxing federation because they weren’t ready to listen. “The third thing is that we now have a team in place to deal with illegal betting whenever it is required.” “Ultimately our main issue and my main concern is issue is about the confidence the athletes have in us. As long as the athletes dream of participating in the Games, as long as the games are the most important competition for them, that's OK “The athletes must be confident that we will fight against doping, for the best standards of refereeing and that we will take care of their welfare by offering them the best facilities - those are the things which count.
“For me the Games are as good as the athletes consider them. All of the other stakeholders are important of course but really it is about the athletes. Are they happy, do they dream of the Games? If we don’t keep the Games special then we are in danger.”
For the full interview with IOC President Jacques Rogge, see the Jan/Feb issue of SportBusiness International.
