Power Game: Thomas Bach’s Iron Grip on the Olympics

How a former fencer wielded diplomacy and guile to drag the Games across the finish line, even in a pandemic, like it or not.

Thomas Bach was crying. He tried to speak, but his voice quavered. It was early March, and Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, was staring out at a curved bank of video screens displaying the placid, smiling faces of the organization’s membership scattered in offices, libraries and living rooms around the world. On the agenda for this virtual meeting was a presidential election. But Bach, running unopposed for a second term, encountered not hard questions about the future of the Olympic movement but a warm bath of obsequiousness, a testament to the power he has amassed controlling the world’s largest, and in some ways most troubled, sports festival.