IOC President Thomas Bach to resign after overseeing controversial Olympics

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach will resign as an IOC Member. His resignation will become effective on 23 June 2025.

The IOC Executive Board (EB) agreed to accept his resignation earlier this week.

The new IOC President will be elected on 20 March 2025 in Costa Navarino, Greece, a race that seems to be focused heavily around the issue of the eligibility of trans athletes to compete in women’s events.

President Bach tendered his resignation this week to the IOC EB following his announcement at the IOC Session in Paris that he would not seek an extension to his presidency.

Seven candidates will compete in the election for the presidency at the 144th IOC Session. The candidates have already presented their programmes, in camera, to the full IOC membership at a meeting held in Lausanne (Switzerland) on 30 January 2025.

The candidates are Prince Feisel Al Hussein (Jordan), David Lapartient (France), Johann Eliasch (Switzerland), Sebastian Coe (England), Kirsty Coventry (Zimbabwe), Juan Samaranch (Spain) and Morinari Watanabe (Japan).

The seven candidates for IOC president with outgoing president, Thomas Bach.

Thomas Bach was elected on 10 September 2013, as the ninth President of the IOC. He was re-elected for a second four-year term on 10 March 2021.

Bach became an Olympic champion when he won a gold medal with his team in foil fencing at the Games of the XXI Olympiad in Montreal in 1976. In 2006, he was elected as the founding President of the German Olympic Sports Confederation (DOSB).

Bach was an athletes’ representative at the XI Olympic Congress in Baden-Baden (1981) and a founding member of the IOC Athletes’ Commission. He was elected as an IOC Member in 1991, and as a member of the IOC Executive Board in 1996, and served as an IOC Vice-President for more than 10 years. He has also chaired several IOC commissions.

However he angered many with his solid defence of the participation of two boxers, Imane Khelif (Algeria) and Lin Yu-Ting (Taiwan) in the women’s category. The two boxers won gold medals despite protests from many of their opponents.

Khelif and Yu-Ting had been previously banned by the International Boxing Association (IBA) from competing in 2023 after sex chromosome tests showed they failed to meet the eligibity criteria to box women. The IOC however uses the sex on an athlete’s passport and both therefore met the Olympic criteria.

That issue seems likely to dominate the upcoming election to replace Bach as it hovered over the 2024 Olympic Games.