Thomas Bach preparing to leave IOC top job with a 'clear conscience' after 12 years

As he approaches his final week in the sporting world's top job, International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach is feeling relaxed.

When a new IOC president is elected Thursday, and Bach formally leaves the role in June, it will be with a "clear conscience," the outgoing boss told reporters this week inside a Greek resort where IOC members will pick his successor.

"It's the period during all my presidency where I do not have an existential problem for the Olympic movement or the Olympic Games on my desk," Bach, who has held the top job in global sport since 2013, said on Monday.

Those challenges have ranged from a global pandemic impacting two separate Olympic Games, war and conflict, and a Russian doping scandal that emerged from the 2014 Games in Sochi. Bach's handling of the latter, in particular, drew criticism, with Russian athletes still able to compete at the Games as neutral athletes.

But Bach leaves on a high note after completing negotiations for an NBC media rights deal worth $3 billion US , and a Games in Paris that felt like the return of the spirit of the Olympics.

Bach said he didn't think his successor would be facing as much uncertainty as he did when he started his mandate more than a decade ago.

But that person does have a long list of challenges to confront, beginning with climate change. Extreme heat and warming temperatures threaten the future of both the Summer and Winter Olympics, something more than 400 athletes, including more than 20 Canadians, emphasized last week in a letter to IOC presidential candidates.

Bach advised his successor to keep athletes at the heart of the Olympic movement and to focus on unity. Doing that requires making sure the more than 200 national Olympic committees are treated equally and the IOC remains politically neutral, he said.

Without that, Bach said the Olympics would become "another tool for politics to divide this world even more."

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In an interview that aired on CNN today, Bach was asked about whether a political leader should be trying to influence sporting regulations, pointing to U.S. President Donald Trump's order banning transgender women and girls from competing in female categories of sport. It's something the next IOC president will have to navigate as Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Summer Olympics.

"World leaders are free to make any comment about everything," Bach told CNN. "What we say is we will need to have a dialogue and then in this dialogue, our autonomy and our political neutrality has to be respected."

Bach also told CNN he believes much of the controversy around two female boxers, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, at the Olympics in Paris was sparked by a Russian disinformation campaign. He said the attacks began after the IOC suspended the International Boxing Association, run by Russian Umar Kremlev, over financial, governance and judging issues.

He stressed again that neither Khelif nor Lin are transgender.