The Japanese, candidate for president of the International Olympic Committee, wants to organize the Games in five cities located on five continents.
What if the Olympics took place simultaneously in five cities located on each continent? It is “crazy idea” of the Japanese Morinari Watanabe, one of the seven candidates to succeed the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach. “Whether it happens or not is not so important: we need to open discussions and come up with new ideas”pleads to the AFP the one who has led the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) since 2017.
At 65, an age which would allow him to finish a first eight-year term but not to be re-elected at the head of the Olympic body, the Japanese appears as an outsider in this electoral battle, which will be decided from the 18th to the 21st. March by the 144th session of the IOC meeting in Greece. Facing him, the boss of world cycling, the Frenchman David Lappartient, as well as those of athletics and skiing, the British middle-distance legend Sebastian Coe and the Swedish-British billionaire Johann Eliasch.
The 2024 Olympics “very distant” seen from Asia
Watanabe will also meet three members of the powerful IOC executive board: the Jordanian prince Faisal al-Hussein, the Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch Junior, son of the former boss of the IOC (1980-2001), and the former Zimbabwean swimmer Kirsty Coventry, two-time Olympic champion and seven-time medalist. The Japanese may have by far the most concise program of the seven contenders, but above all they have the most radical, with a flagship proposal: organizing the Olympic Games in five cities on five continents, with ten sports per territory, and one streaming 24 hours a day.
“I’m putting forward a crazy idea for the first time, but I think young people have even more ideas. My job is to open the door”he explains to AFP. For him, the organization of the Olympic high mass by a single host, an intangible principle since the first modern Games in 1896, has become “stifling”inaccessible for many interested territories, and disconnects part of its audience from the event. “Most people enjoyed the Paris Olympics but seen from Asia, they gave the impression of being very far away”he argues. “I don’t think they created the feeling of unity that was necessary”.
An Olympic forum in place of the Olympic village
For him, breaking up the Games geographically would also offer “better conditions for athletes”by distributing the tests according to local climatic conditions, “so that they would not need to compete early in the morning or late in the evening” to escape the heat. The Japanese leader believes that such a system would also increase potential local sponsors. And to compensate for the absence of an Olympic village bringing together all the competitors, he imagined a “Olympic forum under one roof” after each edition of the Games.
On the governance side, he promises more direction “open”in contrast to the concentration of the main decisions in the hands of the executive commission – the session then ratifying them without discussion. The son of a Hiroshima atomic bomb survivor, Watanabe studied physical education in Tokyo and Bulgaria before becoming director of the sports division of Japanese retail giant Aeon. Gymnastics coach, he took the head of the national body of the discipline then of the FIG, and highlights his travels in “more than 160 countries” within the framework of his duties, to “meet people, understand them and discuss”. If he wins the election, he would become the first Asian president of the IOC.
