Add Category
Posted
"Forget the IOC, vote for the candidate that you believe will best serve sport in your country".
That's the advice from one of the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) most experienced members to Australia's summer and winter Olympic sports on the eve of the Australian Olympic Committee's (AOC) presidential vote.
If Danni Roche should unseat John Coates as the president of the Australian Olympic Committee next week, the idea that Australia would no longer have a voice at the IOC's table is wrong.
A leaked letter from the IOC late on Friday confirmed if Coates was to lose his AOC position, he would lose his IOC blazer as well.
Much is being made of this IOC importance from both sides: Mr Coates (who has 720,000 reasons or more to want to stay in the position he's held for 27 years) and the challenger, Olympic gold medal hockey player and businesswoman, Danni Roche (who has offered to create a new position for Mr Coates so he can keep his IOC titles).
What should be a debate about who will best serve Australian sport — in an era of reduced government funding — has had the spotlight hijacked by the supporting act in the past few days.
A northern-hemisphere-based IOC member, who asked not to be named, said he did not have a view on who should be elected, but "for people to be worrying about the IOC instead of focusing on your domestic needs is to sell your sports short".
"To say that you will lose your international functions is not a major argument, the only argument should be who is the best person for the national body? Who is the most qualified to do the job?''
Coates holds the prestigious title of senior IOC vice-president, and is chairing the committee monitoring the organisation of the next Summer Olympics in Tokyo, 2020.
He has risen to both of those positions by virtue of being "first and foremost the president of an Olympic committee from a very important sporting nation".
"So, who is to stop the next person rising to a similar position?" the IOC member asked.
There's an awesome foursome of Australian IOC members
It should be noted that Coates isn't the only Australian IOC member — there are currently three others.
Rower James Tomkins, one of the Awesome Foursome, is an IOC member whose current term will take him through to the Tokyo 2020 Games.
The six-time Olympian is one of the sport's most decorated athletes and is also a member of three IOC commissions — the Athletes Commission, the Olympic Program Commission and the Marketing Commission.
By all reports he is highly regarded as a valuable contributor, "not like some of the others that turn up and offer nothing", one IOC insider said.
Australia also has two honorary members in Kevan Gosper and Phil Coles, both of whom are fellow Olympians.
On the IOC's Olympic Education Commission is AOC vice-president Helen Brownlee, and serving on the IOC's Sport and Active Society Commission is the internationally recognised Olympic 400 metres champion Cathy Freeman.
Beyond the commissions, and into the hallways of the IOC offices, there are half-a-dozen other Australians including the head of media operations, Anthony Edgar.
Added to that are about a dozen more who have ongoing contractual arrangements in divisions as diverse as sport, security, transport, accommodation, and marketing.
Clearly Coates would be missed should he not survive the upcoming AOC presidential election.
But to suggest Australian sport would be without a voice at the IOC is to diminish the contribution so many others are making.
Topics: olympics-summer, sport, winter-olympics, australia