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McCook alum Ashlyn Randel (above) and Cambridge grad Erin Johnson helped power Team 1 Barnett to two wins at the Wild West All-Star volleyball matches in McCook on Sunday. Former MCC player and Southwest High great Caylin Barnett coached the champion Team 1 in this round-robin featuring three squads filled with top 2025 high school volleyball grads. More will appear on Tuesday’s Gazette sports pages.

Steve Towery/McCook Gazette

Steve Towery/McCook Gazette

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The ethos that guided Thomas Bach during his 12-year presidency of the International Olympic Committee can be found on a wall outside his office at the organization’s headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland: Change or be changed.

As Bach leaves in a handover ceremony on Monday, the end of his tenure finds the IOC changed significantly. The organization he passes on to Kirsty Coventry — the first woman elected since the IOC was founded 131 years ago — is one that has gained relevancy, reached unprecedented commercial success and weathered a series of some of the most challenging Games in its history.

Since he was elected in 2013, Bach has overseen changes to both how the Games are awarded and hosted more sustainably. He pulled the IOC back from a crisis around both that built to a Paris Olympics last summer that embodied his vision. As he has added to the scope of the IOC’s role — from sustainability to gender equality — so, too, has he added to the size of the staff and the power of the presidency.

The balance of how much the IOC changed or was changed during his tenure depends on who is speaking, but interviews with stakeholders from around the movement find the IOC to be a markedly different organization than when he started.

“We indeed have new relevance,” said Bach, citing the Olympic movement’s contribution to “a better society … to peace, health, education, empowerment.”

“It was challenging all the way through, and I enjoyed it all the way through.”

To many, Bach, 71, represents a shrewd political actor who consolidated power as he professionalized the organization. Those close to him see the German lawyer as an exacting leader, to be sure, but also a person with empathy, a dry sense of humor and someone who finds real joy in sport.

“When he knows what the consequences are, he is prepared to go all out in order to achieve them,” said U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee Chairman Gene Sykes, who is an IOC member. “The legacy of Thomas is not that the Games survived, but that he was able to shape the Games in a way that sets them up for the future and gives them the opportunity to be as meaningful as they can be.”

IOC members elected Bach with the expectation that he would shape the Games, elevating the 1976 fencing gold medalist to the top position 22 years after he had joined the membership.

Within months of Bach taking office, the Sochi Olympics proceeded with a record $51 billion price tag and with Russia invading the Crimean Peninsula before the Games closed. The former set the stage for reforms, and the latter kicked off an ever-present series of issues around one of the world’s most influential sporting countries.

That bolstered the late 2014 launch of Agenda 2020 — later updated to Agenda 2020+5 — a 40-point list of recommendations to reform the movement. Among them: working more closely with international federations, national Olympic committees and other organizations in the movement; increasing support for athletes; launching the Olympic Channel; reducing the cost of bidding and hosting; and fostering gender equality.

It later came to include the creation of the Refugee Olympic Team; innovating the IOC’s revenue models so that broadcasters and sponsors supported the IOC’s digital strategy; and emphasizing the universality of the Games.

“When Thomas came along in ’13, the movement was ripe for some pretty serious change,” said longtime Olympic marketer Terrence Burns. “[Modern Olympic founder Pierre de] Coubertin invented it. [Longtime IOC President Juan Antonio] Samaranch saved it. And I think Thomas attempted to reinvent it or evolve it.”

That reinvention included record success commercially. The IOC’s broadcast deals and The Olympic Partner Program (TOP) sponsorships — which make up 60% and 30% of overall revenue, respectively — grew from $5.2 billion for the 2013-16 quad to $7.7 billion for 2021-24.

As Bach worked to improve the brand of the IOC and the movement, it was able to sign bigger deals. TOP expanded to a record 15 sponsors, with Airbnb, Allianz, Deloitte and Toyota among the additions.

“The vision was fantastic for us because we had a little bit of the permission to go in a direction that people weren’t going before,” said Christian Voigt, former IOC vice president of marketing and development.

It also led the IOC in other directions.

The reforms pushed for sustainability, both environmentally and financially, in future hosts. They sought to emphasize Olympic Solidarity, using revenue to support athlete development globally. In 2015, it expanded to include the Refugee Olympic Team.

“This is not a sports organization,” said Nicole Hoevertsz, an IOC member for nearly 20 years who served on its powerful executive board for the past eight. “It has become so much more than that, and that is all because of Thomas Bach.”

That included a concerted effort on gender equality. The Paris Games marked the first time men and women had equal quota spots, around 57% of its administrative staff are women, and the IOC has increased its membership from 21% women in 2013 to 43% now.

“He’s built the pipeline,” said former USOPC chairwoman Susanne Lyons. “He has mentored quite a few of the women in the IOC and helped them get to a place where they are now taking on much bigger roles.”

As the scope of the IOC’s role expanded, so too did the organization.

Under Bach, the administration has grown from 475 people in 2015 to 800 in 2023, the last year for which the organization’s annual report is available. Salaries and social costs have more than doubled in that span, from $89.6 million in 2014 to $251.7 million in 2024.

That expansion has included its first COO, Lana Haddad, hired in 2019. The launch of the Olympic Channel in 2016 led to another 200 staffers at its Madrid office. Timo Lumme, the IOC’s top marketing director until his retirement in 2022, estimated another 50-60 positions were added to a digital and marketing engagement department.

Bach also spearheaded the 2019 opening of the Olympic House, the IOC’s new headquarters in Lausanne, which it built for $168 million.

As Bach professionalized the organization, that has meant a changing role for the IOC’s members. He notes that as he has centralized power — with the broader membership largely rubber stamping decisions of the executive board Bach leads — he has held more sessions and meetings with the membership.

Nevertheless, Dick Pound, who was a member for 44 years and spent 16 years as an IOC vice president, compares the membership to more like shareholders than leaders of the organization, as was the case when he negotiated broadcast deals decades ago.

“We have essentially a 19th-century organization with members here, there and everywhere around the world,” said Pound, who is an honorary IOC member. “And that used to work pretty well when written correspondence was the way you communicated. But as the movement got bigger and more complex, there’s less room for individual members to either develop or input or influence the policy, and that’s not surprising.”

The changes brought by Bach’s proactive vision for the movement are most clear in how the Games are awarded and hosted.

After the excess of the Sochi Games and a Rio Olympics in 2016 that needed significant financial and operational support from the IOC just to take place, the prospect of hosting looked increasingly less appealing, especially to Western European countries. In bidding for the 2022 and 2024 Games, twice as many countries (eight) dropped out as made it to the vote.

“It was a very — if I say extremely diplomatically — a very unpleasant atmosphere and a very risky atmosphere for the credibility of the organization,” Bach said. “And there, for me, it was a no-brainer that we had to make drastic changes.”

That started with awarding two Games at once, with the IOC voting in 2017 to put Olympics in Paris in 2024 and Los Angeles four years later. LA28 Chairman Casey Wasserman said a small circle of IOC leaders and representatives from each city negotiated for months as the IOC tried to avoid a scenario in which Paris might lose for a fourth consecutive time and thus stop bidding, and in which the three largest U.S. cities would each have lost out, following New York for 2012 and Chicago for 2016.

“I think it made them realize, OK, there’s a better way to do this,” Wasserman said. “[Bach] has really done things about stability, consistency and direction — brand management, if you want to call it that — without losing the membership.”

The IOC changed the structure of its bidding process, with its future host commission working alongside potential candidates to vet their fitness to hold the Games well before a vote is cast or millions of dollars are spent. Those deemed suitable are moved to targeted dialogue and, if found fit, approved by the executive board before a vote of the membership.

While many around the movement question if it’s moved too far in the extreme — shifting to an opaque process with little actual say from the members — it has reduced the risk to the brand.

In bidding, the IOC has shifted to emphasize candidates that rely on existing or temporary venues, as Paris and L.A. have.

“Even though I’m a harsh critic overall of the way the IOC has been managed, I think it’s fair to say that the reforms moved in the right direction,” said Smith College professor Andrew Zimbalist, who has written four books on the economics of hosting the Games. “They weren’t as substantial as they needed to be and need to be, but nonetheless, there’s been increased effort to have sustainability at the Games, environmentally and economically.”

That changed vision has come as Bach navigated a continuous string of crises during his presidency.

A widespread Russian doping program, which included the subversion of anti-doping controls at the Sochi Games, resulted in sanctions for the Russian Olympic Committee, as well as officials and some athletes from that nation at every Olympics from Rio to Beijing. Bach and the IOC still allowed individual Russians to compete as neutral athletes, a move that angered athletes and anti-doping officials worldwide. The country remains excluded from the Olympic movement for violating the Olympic Truce with its invasion of Ukraine.

Bach, who missed out on a second Olympics as an athlete when West Germany was part of the 1980 boycott of the Moscow Games, has emphasized the rights of individual athletes.

“We did what was important and what was the interest of the athletes,” Bach said.

Said Burns, “We need Russia, we need Iran, we need China, we need the United States. I don’t think he got that right. And I think over the course of time, he would probably agree with that, but he probably thought he made the best decision he could at the time he was making it to maintain the unity and universality.”

Mostly awarded before Bach became president, the Games during his tenure represented several challenges.

Due to consistent operational challenges, the 2016 Games in Rio were “existential,” said former IOC marketing director Michael Payne. “He went to bed each night not knowing if he had a Games the next day.”

Two years later, nuclear concerns overshadowed the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, with Bach helping broker North Korean participation to ensure some stability.

“He finds, I think, great energy when the purpose and the stakes are extremely high,” said Christophe Dubi, Olympic Games executive director. “He loves when it’s challenging.”

No stakes were higher than in 2020, with the pandemic arriving just months before the Tokyo Games were to begin. Working with a small staff in Switzerland, Bach persuaded Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and local organizers to postpone the Games and commit to hosting them in 2021.

Strict restrictions on vaccinations and testing led organizers to bar fans, but to Bach, canceling the Games was not a consideration.

“We would have lost a whole generation of athletes if we would not have had these Games. And for the movement as such, it would have been very risky not to have the Games in eight years,” Bach said. “This, for me, would have been really a treason against the athletes, and therefore it was really never a question.”

As Bach, the IOC and Japanese organizers worked to plan the Games amid continuous uncertainty around the pandemic, he didn’t share his doubts or worries publicly for fear they would destabilize the plans ahead. It was, he said later, a “lonely” period.

“To shift the massive Olympic infrastructure a year and with the uncertainty of where Covid was going to take us was an unbelievable accomplishment,” said NBC Olymipcs president Gary Zenkel. “There were many, many reasons for the Japanese to walk away, and he held that together.”

For all difficulty he had endured, Bach’s final Games in Paris delivered on the vision he brought to the presidency.

Using mostly existing venues and putting temporary ones in some of the city’s most iconic locations, Paris revitalized the movement and renewed interest in the Games. Last week, organizers there announced an $87 million profit, according to Le Monde.

After Paris the IOC lost five sponsors, including three Japanese companies whose ROI was hampered by Covid in the Tokyo Games, but added TCL earlier this year and extended deals with Anheuser-Busch InBev and Allianz. In March, the IOC and NBCUniversal announced a $3 billion extension for another quad to keep the U.S. rights through 2036. Those additions give the IOC $7.4 billion in revenue secured for this quad, and $6.5 billion signed for 2029-32.

Bach leaves with hosts secured through 2034, with the IOC awarding those Games to Salt Lake City last year. It has said it has a double-digit number of cities interested in hosting 2036 and beyond.

“He drove the ship through really turbulent times and guaranteed its success far further in the future than I think anybody else could have,” Wasserman said. “He has created a level of consistency and stability that will allow it to maintain its place in the global ecosystem, and he was probably uniquely capable of doing that.”

That security helped Bach step away despite calls from members that he seek a third term, something that would have required amending the Olympic charter. Citing the good governance reforms he put in place, Bach chose not to make that change.

Bach, named honorary IOC president for life, has remained a visible presence during his lame-duck period. Since the election, he has visited the new pope in Vatican City, received the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun from the emperor of Japan and attended the French Open women’s final.

He has few defined plans beyond sleeping in on Tuesday, though he will have more time to spend with his wife, Claudia, and other friends and family. Ever the competitor, he has no plans to take up golf, finding it too slow for his taste.

Mark Adams, the IOC president’s spokesperson, recalls at one point Bach adroitly commenting, “This kind of work-life balance thing, I don’t really understand it, because I love what I do.”

Bach said he will take a few months to see if anyone in the movement reaches out for help but, failing that, he will find his own ways to be useful.

“I have done for the Olympic movement what I could do and [tried] in these uncertain times to secure the stability of the movement, in every respect, and to prepare the movement for the future,” he said. “I’m very much at ease, because I know with [Coventry] the Olympic movement is in the best hands.

“Being changed is not a project you can finish,” he added. “That will always be work in progress.”