The playbook that keeps Thomas Bach in power at the IOC
Thomas Bach has been re-elected as IOC President for a final term without any opponents or opposition. Using Bach’s doctoral thesis as a departure point, Jens Weinreich describes how constantly planning for the future has provided Bach with an unprecedented hold on power in the Olympic system.
The German National Library has two branches. One in Frankfurt am Main, where the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB) and numerous sports associations are based. There is a second branch in Leipzig, the city that applied in vain for the 2012 Summer Olympics – and which was once the intellectual centre of GDR sport, along with its criminal excesses.
Some years ago I went to Leipzig to get closer to the man who was already playing a central role in world Olympic sport back then. The man I had been observing for more than twenty years, whom I researched, and about whom I had reported extensively.
So I ordered Thomas Bach’s doctoral thesis from the German National Library.
Then the little book that had interested me for a long time finally lay in front of me. Lime green cover. 211 pages. Signature Di 1983 A 8224. Nobody had asked for it for thirty years. The booklet seemed virgin, untouched. Neither side of this “Inaugural dissertation to obtain the dignity of Doctor juris utriusque of the High Law Faculty of the Bavarian Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg” was broken. The author: Thomas Bach, born on December 29, 1953 in Würzburg “as the son of the businessman Andreas Bach and his wife Maria”.
