The future of the Olympics
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Hello and welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service. I'm Alex Kapstick and today we're in Greece where a new president has just been elected to take on the most powerful role in sport, head of the International Olympic Committee, the IOC. It's a huge honour. I never realised when I was nine years old making that

dream for myself of going to the Olympic Games and winning a gold medal that it would lead my life to this point. The first woman and first African to be IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, takes over at a pivotal moment for the Olympics.

There are daunting challenges ahead. The president must tread a path through a rocky geopolitical landscape while figuring out the best way to protect and grow the IOC's revenues, while keeping the sponsors and broadcasters happy. Everything has changed. Buying habits have changed. Consumer media consumption habits have changed.

So just saying that you're the official hamburger of the Olympic Games is no longer enough. There's pressure to make the Olympics more relevant to a younger audience and to take the Games to new markets. There are cities that want to host the Olympics. It's whether they're the kind of cities that are acceptable to the IOC. The Middle Eastern countries are desperate to host the Olympics. So what next for the Olympics? That's all coming up on today's programme. MUSIC

We're in Greece at the ancient ruins of Olympia, home of the Olympic Games. And this is an all-too-predictable cultural interlude at the opening ceremony of the International Olympic Committee's 144th session

It's a kind of AGM to you and me when all the big decisions are made. In the audience are champion athletes, politicians, royals, billionaire business leaders and even Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh, all members of the IOC.

Their main job in Greece is to choose a new president. Watching from the sidelines is Michael Payne. He was the organisation's first ever marketing and broadcasting director. Nowadays, he describes himself as an advisor to the Olympic movement.

No matter how successful the Olympic movement is today and after Paris, which were incredibly successful games, but you look at the challenges, the clouds on the horizon, whether they are the weaponization of the politics of sport, whether it's the changing business model for sponsorship and broadcasting,

talking to some IOC members and said, do you realise how critical this is? And they come back and said, yeah, survival. Although the IOC's finances remain strong, they were hit recently by the sudden departures of three major sponsors. Nobody's panicking, but it does suggest the current model needs looking at.

And while the sale of broadcast rights, the other major source of revenue, continues to prosper, the unstoppable growth of digitalisation and social media platforms presents a challenge. But as Michael Payne explains, in the short term at least, the focus is elsewhere. I think politically, if you look at where the next Olympic Games are going to be in Los Angeles in 2028, and who is scheduled to open those games, President Trump,

You then look at how is the foreign policy going to play out over the next two or three years and how do you make sure that the Olympics is not held hostage. The IOC president is going to have their time cut out full time to just keep the Olympics out of that crossfire.

This is where the real action is happening. It's about a two-hour drive south of Olympia at this sprawling luxury resort on the Peloponnese coast in southwest Greece.

I'm overlooking a huge complex filled with dozens of infinity pools, spas, water slides and four golf courses. It's a place built for high-end relaxation and enjoyment. But this week, with an important election about to take place, the atmosphere is tense and urgent. Now,

Now we are ready to start election time. After months of campaigning and lobbying, it all came down to a secret vote of the 109 members. The list of contenders included six men. The only female candidate was a two-time Olympic swimming champion from Zimbabwe. The 144th IOC session.

has elected as the tenth president of the International Olympic Committee Mrs. Kirsty Coventry. An extraordinary victory. She had defeated more experienced rivals such as Britain's Lord Sebastian Coe and Spain's Juan Antonio Samaranch, whose father had a 21-year stint as president of the IOC. It's a stunning achievement.

Kirsty, congratulations. Can you begin by putting into context what you've achieved here, being the first female, the first African ISU president? Well, I think it's going to take a couple of days to truly sink in, but it's a huge honour and I'm grateful for the support that I've had.

And especially to all the women that have been in my life strong leaders. You know, I had really good examples of being able to go after everything. So I'm very lucky to have had that.

What will be your list of priorities? We need to really analyse everything that we have been doing. That's going to take a lot of dialogue with all of our stakeholders, with the IOC members, the athletes, with our top sponsors. And so there's going to be a lot of dialogue. The LA Games, the next summer games in 2028, presumably you'll pay a visit to the White House in the next few months. I mean, how are you going to deal with Donald Trump? Yeah.

I have to have a little smile when I get asked this question. I'm not new to having to navigate tough discussions. I've been doing that since I was 20 years old.

As the Olympic movement, it's our job to sit down with President Trump and have a good understanding of each other's expectations and work on how we're going to work together to achieve those. Thanks, Kirsty. And again, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. You're listening to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.

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Today, what are the challenges ahead for the International Olympic Committee's new president, Kirsty Coventry? Keeping the sponsors happy will be high on her agenda. I'm on my way to meet Dick Pound, the Canadian described by many in the Olympic movement as the best president it never had. He's now an honorary life member of the IOC.

Richard, thanks for talking to us. It's 24 hours now since Kirsty Coventry was named as the next president. This is a change that has been a long time in the making.

A paradigm shift, and I think we're ready for it. You talk about a paradigm shift, but will it be a continuation of what's been happening under Thomas Back? They're very close. He was a mentor to her. She will have the benefit of really good mentorship from Thomas if that's what she wants. I mean, she's not just putty in somebody's hands here. People are saying that the vote went the way it did, partly because she had Thomas Back's backing.

I think that's entirely likely. The outgoing president probably should not get too involved in the selection of his successor. But on the other hand, people will say, listen, you've worked with her the last 10 years. Has she got the right stuff? And he would be able to comment on that. And I think she's somebody who's going to grow into the job and...

we'll understand she's got to do that pretty quickly. Part of Kirsty Coventry's role is to ensure the finances remain robust. That will include a review of what is known as the TOP Global Sponsorship Programme. TOP stands for the Olympic Partner. It allows companies to buy exclusive rights in their product categories for an agreed number of summer and winter Olympics, along with an association with the Olympic brand throughout that period.

It's been a massive success and is partly why the organisation is on course to surpass commercial revenues of $8 billion for the current four-year Olympiad, ending with the LA Games in 2028. But according to many experts, the model needs more flexibility. Dick Pound was responsible for putting the top in place in the mid-1980s.

The top program was a response to concerns among the private sector. You know, we love the Olympics, but you're too hard to do business with. So we sort of noodled around and said, all right, what if we can put together an international program where you get the winter games and the summer games in the days when they were separate, the IOC separately.

and all the National Olympic committees. One-stop shopping. And they were stunned that we would be ready to do something like that, and they said that would be wonderful. And I said, what if we added a little bonus to that by saying that if you are part of the top program in your category, nobody else...

can have any Olympic identification. And they said, this is wonderful. If you can do that, we're in. And all of those elements are still there and would have to be in any international program. So you'd worry then if there were going to be moves to tear it apart or make it into something completely different? The object here is to get enough money to finance the Olympic movement and the Olympic Games. So

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Terence Burns is a sports marketing guru with years of experience working on both sides, with the sponsors and with the IOC. He says the relationship can no longer rely only on the exclusivity it buys. That's called product category exclusivity, which has served us well for 40 years, but everything has changed.

Just saying that you're the official hamburger of the Olympic Games is no longer enough. You need to tell a story, why that's important. How does that fit with the Games itself? How does that improve the life of athletes?

That's, I think, what sponsors are yearning for now. And what about the number of sponsors coming? We've lost a few recently. Toyota was the big one. That's left a bit of a hole. Is that something that the new president will have to look at closely? I'm not worried about commercial interest in association with the Olympic movement at all. What I would like to see is that

association evolve into a more modern mechanism that sponsors get the value they need out of new media, out of younger generations.

The list of multinationals currently on board is impressive. They include Coca-Cola, Intel, Samsung and the global insurance giant Allianz, which recently extended its partnership with the IOC until 2032. My name is Eike Dörte-Bürgel. I'm working for Allianz and I'm leading the global Olympic and Paralympic partnership programme. We believe in the mission...

Eike Bergel negotiated the IOC deal. She spoke to me from the company's headquarters in Munich. Well, it all comes back to Paris being a huge success. We had discussions on what are topics which both sides move, if it's the future, addressing young people. So there was nothing in the way to say we'll commit to the movement even longer.

There's been a lot of talk about whether the relationship between the IOC and its sponsors should change, it should modernize. Is that how you see it? There's always room to further evolve a partnership and a platform. And that is what we are doing with the Olympic movement. Speaking about the next generation, how do they consume sport? How are they interested in sports? The role of esports? But in terms of...

getting more from the deal. For example, clean venues, you're not allowed to advertise inside any of the venues. Was that a discussion at all? For sure, as a partner, and especially as an intangible product of insurance, you always see how can you make your brand and your product tangible. Yeah, and we have those discussions for sure how we can, within the Olympic environment, drive the topic of visibility.

Is it in venue? This is for now not of discussion because the Olympic Charter is what it is and we'll see where it brings us in the future.

In another recent announcement, US broadcaster NBC unveiled a $3 billion extension to its Olympics deal, securing exclusive rights to show the summer and winter games in North America until 2036. The most striking element of the agreement was the emphasis placed on its digital offer. Peter Hutton is former CEO of Eurosport and was head of sport at Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

It's fair to say that the majority of income for the next broadcast cycle and maybe the one after that will come from fairly established players or the big streamers. But at the same time, those individual first person narrative stories of athletes, of influencers are going to gain in importance. And the IOC has to strike a balance between looking after where the big checks come from and being relevant to the audience around them.

And if that means relaxing their rules on exclusivity, does that mean the broadcasters will pay less? It probably does. But again, it's a relative thing because, you know, those rights fees have gone up very healthily over the years. The Olympics itself is still iconic. So I'm still quite bullish about the long term economic viability of the Olympics and its ability to grow numbers.

I think the other big challenge and potentially the area where they can innovate most is the Esports Olympics, which comes up in a couple of years now. And that perhaps allows them to do some experimentation, to work with publishing content in a different way, learn from that and then maybe bring it to the main summer and winter games.

What about finding countries willing to host? 2036 is the next vacancy for potential host cities. Other global events such as the Commonwealth Games have seen a well-publicised struggle for hosts, largely due to financial outlay. The emphasis has been for a more cost-effective Olympic Games –

But there's also pressure to take the Olympics to new markets. UK-based journalist Duncan Mackay has been writing about the Olympic movement for decades. Well, Paris 2024 was a great success in that because they repurposed a lot of the stadiums they had and used some of their iconic landmarks to host events. And that worked fabulously well.

LA have done the same as Paris. They've repurposed former venues. There are cities that want to host the Olympics. They're the kind of cities that are acceptable to the IOC. We're talking about Doha, Riyadh. The Middle Eastern countries are desperate to host the Olympics.

But the problem with that is they would probably be major infrastructure projects, which, of course, these countries can easily afford, but perhaps in the wrong message to other bidding cities. And also we have the human rights issues, which is such a big thing in the West. So you think unlikely that those types of countries will come up with a winning bid, a winning offer?

I don't think you can keep turning them down. That's the issue that the IOC have. Particularly with Riyadh and Saudi Arabia, we have seen the amount of money they've invested in sport around the world, and they will expect a return on their investment. Of course, another country that would love to host the Olympics is India, the biggest country in the world never to have hosted them, and a huge potential market for the IOC in sponsorship and TV revenue.

So I think over the next 20, 30 years, the kind of cities we see hosting the Olympics are going to be very different to the ones we're used to. What shouldn't change is the thrilling spectacle of watching the world's best athletes in action. But there are questions on whether medalists should be paid prize money. In Paris last year, winners in the track and field events were each rewarded with a cheque for $50,000.

The prospect of extending it to all sports at the Olympics has been raised, but within the IOC, there doesn't seem to be much of an appetite for it. Emma Turho, a former ice hockey player from Finland, is the current chair of the IOC's Athletes' Commission. She's not convinced it's necessary. Yeah.

Obviously we're looking constantly at different ways of how we can help the athletes also off the field. We'll be building programs where the athletes can be benefited with the Career Plus, with Airbnb. They're getting help through that and with mentorship programs and different ways of how we can be looking at support ways for athletes. So I think it's something that we will continue doing. You are an athlete. Would you have liked to have been paid for competing for your country?

By the IOC? From our NOC, we got rewarded after and I think many countries have that in place. It's important to have, we have for instance the Olympic Solidarity Scholarship so for the athletes, for the longer term, for them to be able to prepare for the Games, I think that's important to be able to have. Important but enough, especially for athletes from countries where there aren't that many resources?

I think it's an important part of there with the solidarity it's going for the long term so we can make sure that also in the future we're going to have athletes that are able to prepare no matter if they're not only coming from the richest countries.

Following her triumph in Greece, Kirsty Coventry takes over an IOC in a good place, financially sound, with host cities secured until 2034. But the organisation's first female president has some tough issues to face, from keeping the Olympics relevant, especially for young people, to the potential difficulties caused when sport is politicised. It is not going to be easy.

The programme was produced and presented by me, Alex Capstick. To hear more, just search for Business Daily wherever you get your BBC podcasts. And thanks for listening.

When you have bars in the sky, onboard showers and award-winning in-flight entertainment, it's no surprise that Emirates was recently named the best airline in the world. We fly you to over 140 destinations and with partners across the globe, we connect you to another 1,700 cities across six continents. So when we say we're also the largest international airline, what we really mean is...

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