There are 100 days until the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
So much is made, every four years, of the power of the Olympics to bring the world together, showcase the best of humanity, etc…so I decided to take a look at how the IOC articulates its vision, mission and values, and ultimately how the Olympic Movement is positioned.
The mission of the IOC is to promote Olympism throughout the world and to lead the Olympic Movement.
That’s the first thing you see on the mission section of the IOC website, followed by 18 different aspects of what the IOC sees as its role within sport.
As mission statements go, I don’t think it’s great. It’s very self-referential and does nothing to really set out an inspirational sense of what impact the IOC is hoping to make in the world.
What is Olympism?
To find that, we need to dig a little deeper to the IOC’s ‘Principles’ and a definition of what ‘Olympism’ actually is. Apparently it’s “a philosophy of life, which places sport at the service of humankind”. I’m all for aspirational statements, but this feels like a bit of an over-reach, while also being a bit meaningless.
The vision of “Building a better world through sport” is OK, if a little generic and functional. I’d like to see something here that paints a more vivid picture of what that better world looks like, and how sport can contribute to that.
I quite like the values of ‘Excellence’, ‘Respect’ and ‘Friendship’. They’ve resisted the urge to choose too many, and while you could argue that these are also quite generic, they do feel like a genuine reflection of what what the Olympic movement is all about.
They do expand upon these values, along with some more statements about the philosophy and goal of Olympism. There are a lot of words here, and it all starts to get a bit confusing.
The original values of Olympism as expressed in the Olympic Charter were to “encourage effort”, “preserve human dignity” and “develop harmony”.
Over time, they have evolved and are now expressed in more contemporary terms as:
- Striving for excellence and encouraging people to be the best they can be.
- Demonstrating respect in many different manners: respect towards yourself, the rules, your opponents, the environment, the public, etc.
- Celebrating friendship, which is quite unique to the Olympic Games – an event that brings people together every few years.
This is the idea of setting your rivalries aside. There is more that unites us than divides us.
Olympism is a philosophy of life, exalting and combining in a balanced whole the qualities of body, will and mind. Blending sport with culture and education, Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.
The goal of the Olympic Movement is to contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.
Faster, higher, stronger
We also have the Olympic Motto, effectively the tag-line for the Games, and probably the thing that most people would recognise (although I hadn’t realised that they’d added ‘Together’ in 2021).
This is an attempt to move that motto away from being purely about the performance of the athletes and align it more closely with the broader mission of creating a better world and bringing people together. This feels like kind of a fudge, and it might have been better to completely reinvent things, but you’d be giving up 128 years of equity and I can only imagine the politics that would be involved in that decision.
That ‘Together’ theme is brought to life quite nicely in a couple of videos from the immediate post-Covid era, and it does feel like the idea of the Olympics bringing nations and people together should be absolutely at the centre of things.
The Olympics needs a sharper positioning
I love the Olympics and I have no doubt that the IOC does some excellent work around the world. But ,in an era when the Games is slightly struggling for relevance and trying to engage a younger audience, it feels like the vision and mission of the IOC and the Olympic Movement has become pretty bloated. It’s easy for that happen in an organisation that’s been around for so long and has so many stakeholders, but I feel the whole thing needs a much more focused, sharper positioning to set it up for the next 100+ years.
