Igniting the Games by David Miller

Igniting the Games – the Evolution of the Olympics and Bach’s legacy

by David Miller

Reviewed by Philip Barker

ISOH member David Miller’s new book represents the first full length assessment of Thomas Bach’s leadership of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and provides a fascinating chronicle on nine years in which “Bach sustained IOC equilibrium through many crises.”

His first Games as President were the Winter Olympics in Sochi 2014.

Miller asserts that the gleaming new Olympic city “offered much for Bach to welcome.”

The President himself seemed euphoric at the progress made by the new Russia.

“This is a night of anticipation and dreams,” Bach had said. “We can see that Russia has delivered and I would like to thank President Putin for the commitment.”

His comments and apparently cordial relationship with the Russian President have undergone no little re-evaluation, first because of the doping revelations in the wake of Sochi 2014, destined to cast a long shadow over the Olympic movement, and more recently because of the continued assault on Ukraine.

The book includes a picture captioned “Bach innocently and unwittingly engages Putin.”

A later illustration shows Bach shaking hands with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

“Bach well recognised where the IOC needed friends but not soon enough a veiled evil,” Miller observes.

The book also reveals how the actions of Moscow had an impact on his own sporting career almost 40 years before.

In 1980, United States President Jimmy Carter demanded a boycott of the Moscow Olympics in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Bach, a gold medallist in team foil at the 1976 Olympics, was obliged to miss the Moscow Games because the West German government supported the boycott.

“Bach was prominent among German athletes antagonised by a meaningless gesture-principle in which they played no active part,” Miller wrote.

Partly as a result, Bach was one of a group of athletes invited to Baden-Baden the following year for the first IOC Congress held under the newly elected President Juan Antonio Samaranch.

In the years that followed, Bach, a lawyer by background became a prominent and articulate administrator, first in Germany, and then as an IOC member and ultimately President in 2013.

Miller considers Bach’s strategy plan Agenda 2020, a document set before the full membership of the IOC and approved at a special session in Monaco in 2014.

This was a 40-point document which embodied Bach’s mantra  “Change or be Changed.”

Miller himself first covered the Olympics in 1964 and his book draws on extensive contacts and encounters which inform his assessment of the present.

“Important committee decisions should always be by an uneven number, and three is too many,” Miller noted that  a previous IOC President Lord Killanin had made such a comment, probably only half in jest.

It leads him to ponder the increasing influence of the Executive Board (EB)and by extension the personal influence of Bach himself is revealed.

For Miller the radical change to the method for selecting host cities calls into question the very raison d’ être of the full IOC session.

It has by any measure been a remarkable decade.

“After the tribulations we experienced in Rio three years into my presidency, I had supposed that from thereon my task would become easier, I could relax,” Bach reflected.

It proved a vain hope.

Originally planned simply as an extension to Miller’s earlier survey of previous IOC Presidents in “Olympic Guardians,” the events of the last nine years almost demanded a dedicated volume.

ISBN: 9781801501422

Format: Paperback, 272 pages

Pitch Publishing £12.99