International Olympic Committee

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 23rd of June 1894, Pierre de Coubertin gathered delegates in Paris and created an organization that would one day govern the sports lives of billions. The International Olympic Committee was born that day, with a Greek named Demetrios Vikelas as its first president. More than a century later, it oversees 206 National Olympic Committees, manages revenues exceeding five billion dollars per quadrennium, and sits at the center of some of the most charged controversies in modern sport.

  What does it mean to run the world's most watched sporting event? How does an organization founded on ideals of peace and fair play end up entangled in bribery scandals, doping cover-ups, and geopolitical standoffs? And who actually decides what the Olympics is for?

  Those questions have no simple answers. But the IOC's record offers a remarkable case study in the tension between high principle and raw power.

• 2. A Body Built on Ideals

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  Pierre de Coubertin drew early inspiration from the aristocratic ethos of English public schools, where sport was treated as moral education, not professional craft. That philosophical root shaped the IOC's founding belief: that competing was noble, but training too hard was, oddly, considered cheating. The amateur ideal was not just a rule; it was a class statement.

  The IOC codified that belief for decades. As IOC president from 1952 to 1972, Avery Brundage rejected every effort to link the Olympics with commercial interests. Brundage worried that corporate money would distort the organization's decisions. While he held the line, the IOC operated on a small budget, and by the time he retired, its total assets stood at just two million US dollars.

  The mission the IOC articulates today is far more expansive than Coubertin's founding vision. Its formal list of goals includes protecting clean athletes, fighting doping, promoting gender equality, supporting environmental sustainability, and placing sport at the service of humanity. Members joining the IOC must swear an oath to act independently of commercial and political interests and to fight all forms of discrimination. The oath is taken seriously enough to be printed and required, even as the organization's history shows how difficult that promise is to keep.

• 3. The Money Machine

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  When Juan Antonio Samaranch became IOC president in 1980, he set out to make the organization financially independent. He appointed Canadian IOC member Richard Pound to lead what was called the "New Sources of Finance Commission." What followed was a transformation that reshaped the Olympics entirely.

  In 1982, the IOC brought in a Swiss sports marketing firm, International Sport and Leisure, to build a global sponsorship programme. A staff member at that firm, Michael Payne, crossed over to the IOC in 1989 and became the organization's first-ever marketing director. The programme he helped build, in collaboration with ISL Marketing and then its successor Meridian Management, eventually became a multibillion-dollar engine.

  By the 2001-2004 Olympic quadrennium, the Olympic Movement was generating more than four billion US dollars in total revenue. By the 2013-2016 period, that figure had risen to about five billion, with seventy-three percent coming from broadcasting rights alone and eighteen percent from the TOP sponsorship programme. Sponsors in the current TOP programme include Coca-Cola, Samsung Electronics, Visa, Alibaba Group, and Omega SA, among others.

  The IOC keeps roughly ten percent of that marketing revenue for its own operations. The rest flows outward. For the 2013-2016 period, the Rio 2016 organising committee received one and a half billion US dollars. National Olympic committees and international federations each received about 739 million dollars. Brundage's two-million-dollar treasury had become something categorically different.

• 4. Scandal and Reform

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  On the 10th of December 1998, Swiss IOC member Marc Hodler announced that several IOC members had accepted gifts from Salt Lake City's bid committee in exchange for votes for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Four simultaneous investigations opened instantly: by the IOC itself, the United States Olympic Committee, the Salt Lake City organising committee, and the United States Department of Justice.

  Before any investigation concluded, the co-heads of the Salt Lake City committee, Tom Welch and David Johnson, resigned. The Department of Justice filed fifteen counts of bribery and fraud against the pair. When the IOC's own review finished, ten members had been expelled and another ten sanctioned. The fallout produced structural change: stricter bid rules, caps on how much IOC members could accept from candidate cities, new term and age limits for membership, a new Athletes' Commission, and fifteen provisional spots for former Olympic athletes.

  The amateurism dispute had already prompted an earlier round of soul-searching. Canada withdrew from international ice hockey competition after the IIHF reversed a 1969 decision to allow nine non-NHL professionals to compete at the 1970 World Championships. The IOC's Brundage had declared that allowing professionals would jeopardize ice hockey's Olympic status. Canada's officials said they would not return until open competition was instituted. By the end of the 1970s, amateurism began to fade from the Olympic Charter. After the 1988 Games, the IOC declared all professional athletes eligible for the Olympics, subject to approval by the relevant international federations.

  The Salt Lake City scandal also tightened the rules around how IOC members are elected. Members now cease to be members automatically upon reaching age 70 if they joined after 2000, or age 80 if they joined earlier. Failing to attend sessions for two consecutive years ends membership as well. Expulsion remains possible by session vote for any member who betrays their oath or acts in a way deemed unworthy of the IOC.

• 5. Doping and the Russian Question

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  German broadcaster ARD first brought the Russian doping story to wide attention in December 2014, reporting on what it described as state-sponsored doping comparable to practices once used in East Germany. The World Anti-Doping Agency commissioned an independent investigation led by Richard McLaren. McLaren's report, published in July 2016, concluded that Russia's Ministry of Sport and the Federal Security Service had operated a state-directed system using what the report called a "disappearing positive methodology" from at least late 2011 through August 2015.

  WADA recommended that Russia be banned entirely from the 2016 Summer Olympics. The IOC declined. Instead, it delegated athlete-by-athlete decisions to the relevant international federations. The day before the opening ceremony, 270 Russian athletes were cleared to compete under their flag, while 167 were barred for doping. The International Paralympic Committee, by contrast, voted unanimously to ban the entire Russian team from the 2016 Summer Paralympics.

  On the 5th of December 2017, the IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee from the 2018 Winter Olympics. Russian athletes with clean histories were permitted to compete as "Olympic Athletes from Russia," without the Russian flag or anthem. The Court of Arbitration for Sport later overturned IOC sanctions against 28 of those athletes for insufficient evidence, though the IOC said in a statement that not being sanctioned did not automatically confer the privilege of an invitation.

  After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on the 24th of February 2022, the IOC recommended that other international sporting bodies follow its lead in banning Russia and Belarus. By the 12th of October 2023, the IOC suspended the Russian Olympic Committee itself after it unilaterally folded four Ukrainian regions, including Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, into its own membership. During the 2026 Winter Olympics, the IOC banned Ukrainian skeleton pilot Vladyslav Heraskevych for wearing a helmet featuring images of Ukrainian athletes killed in the war, a decision Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said played into the hands of aggressors.

• 6. Human Rights and the Host City Problem

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  Awarding the 2008 Summer Olympics to Beijing drew sustained objection from human rights groups as early as 2000, when international organisations attempted to pressure the IOC to reject the bid. One Chinese dissident was sentenced to two years in prison during an IOC tour. After the Games were awarded, Amnesty International argued that Chinese government policies violated the Olympic Charter's principle that Olympism should promote a peaceful society concerned with human dignity.

  Days before the 2008 opening ceremonies, the IOC issued Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices against Tibetan protest videos on YouTube. YouTube and the Electronic Frontier Foundation pushed back, and the IOC eventually withdrew the complaint.

  The 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing produced a second confrontation. Weeks before the opening, the Xinjiang Papers were released, documenting what many governments described as genocide against the Uyghur population. Several governments, including those of the United States and Britain, called for boycotts. On the 14th of October 2021, IOC vice-president John Coates stated that human rights issues in China were "not within the IOC's remit."

  The 1976 Winter Olympics created a different kind of controversy before a single venue was built. Denver had been awarded the Games on the 12th of May 1970, but Colorado voters rejected a five-million-dollar bond issue by sixty percent on the 7th of November 1972. Denver withdrew on the 15th of November. The IOC then offered the Games to Whistler, British Columbia, which declined after a change of government. Salt Lake City offered to step in, but the IOC declined that offer too, instead inviting Innsbruck on the 5th of February 1973. Innsbruck had hosted the Games twelve years before.

  The Nagano controversy took years to surface. A report commissioned by the Nagano region's governor found, eight years after the 1998 Winter Olympics, that the Japanese city had provided what it called an illegitimate and excessive level of hospitality to IOC members, including 4.4 million US dollars spent on entertainment. Nagano had destroyed its financial records after the IOC asked that the entertainment expenditures not be made public.

• 7. Sex Verification and Athletic Eligibility

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  Verifying the sex of Olympic participants is not a modern invention. The practice dates to ancient Greece, when a woman named Kallipateira disguised herself as a man to enter the arena as a trainer. After she was discovered, a rule was put in place requiring trainers and athletes alike to appear naked before competition.

  By 1966, the IOC implemented a compulsory sex verification process that took effect at the 1968 Winter Olympics, using a Barr body test administered through a lottery system. Fifteen geneticists evaluated that approach and unanimously agreed it was scientifically invalid. By the 1970s the IOC replaced it with PCR testing and additional evaluations. Following opposition from the IOC's own Athletes' Commission, mandatory sex testing ended entirely in 1999.

  A replacement policy arrived in 2011. The IOC's Hyperandrogenism Regulation aimed to standardise testosterone levels in women athletes, on the basis that elevated testosterone could provide an unfair competitive advantage. Female athletes whose levels exceeded the regulation were barred from competing until medical treatment brought their hormones within range. Notable cases of bans connected to testing results include Maria Jose Martinez-Patino in 1985, Santhi Soundarajan in 2006, Caster Semenya in 2009, Annet Negesa in 2012, and Dutee Chand in 2014.

  Before the 2014 Asian Games, Indian athlete Dutee Chand was banned under the Hyperandrogenism Regulation. After the Court of Arbitration for Sport denied her appeal, the IOC suspended the policy for the 2016 Summer Olympics and 2018 Winter Olympics. In March 2026, the IOC announced a new policy requiring that only athletes classified as biological females, determined through genetic sex screening, may compete in the women's category, while athletes who do not meet that standard may compete in male or open categories.

• 8. A New Chapter

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  In September 2024, the IOC revealed seven candidates for the presidency, among them Sebastian Coe, David Lappartient, Juan Antonio Samaranch Salisachs, Prince Faisal bin Hussein, Johan Eliasch, Morinari Watanabe, and Kirsty Coventry. In March 2025, Kirsty Coventry became the first woman and the first African ever elected as IOC president.

  The organization she now leads completed a significant physical change in 2019. On the 23rd of June of that year, the IOC inaugurated its new headquarters, called the Olympic House, in Vidy, Lausanne. The project had been approved in November 2015 at an estimated cost of 156 million US dollars. The Olympic Museum remained in its separate location in Ouchy, Lausanne.

  In February 2025, the IOC announced the inaugural Olympic Esports Games would take place in 2027 in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, in collaboration with the Esports World Cup Foundation. Then-IOC president Thomas Bach called the event "historic."

  The IOC also received Permanent Observer status at the United Nations General Assembly in 2009, giving it the ability to attend General Assembly meetings and take the floor. The UN General Assembly had earlier, in 1993, approved a resolution to revive the Olympic Truce as part of formalising IOC-UN cooperation. Coventry's stated vision for the Games is making them accessible to everyone regardless of where they were born. That aspiration, first planted by two men in Paris in 1894, remains the IOC's most durable and contested promise.