THOMAS BACH was re-elected as president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) during the virtual 137th IOC Session organized from Lausanne, Switzerland, on Wednesday for a final four-year term, with his immediate focus on this year’s delayed Tokyo Games.

The 66-year-old was unopposed and won the vote 93-1, with four members abstaining, after an opening eight-year mandate dominated by the Russian doping scandal and the first Olympics to be postponed in peacetime.

Bach, who won gold with the German foil fencing team at the Olympic Games Montreal 1976, was elected as IOC president in 2013 for a first eight-year term. This term will finish on the closing day of the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 on Aug. 8 this year. His second term as IOC president will start immediately after and conclude in 2025.

“Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart for this overwhelming vote of confidence and trust,” Bach said at the online meeting of IOC members.

The president then stressed that his campaign motto for his first run “unity in diversity” will continue to be true in his second and last term, before calling on a discussion with the IOC members and the Olympic community to add “together” in the Olympic motto.

“We could add after a hyphen — together. Faster, higher, stronger-together,” he noted. “This could be — from my point of view — a strong commitment to our core value of solidarity, and an appropriate and a humble adaptation to the challenges of this new world.”

Bach said Tokyo was “the best prepared Olympic city ever” and reiterated that the Games would open July 23 despite restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The question is not whether, the question is how this Olympic Games will take place,” he said.

He said the IOC has reached an agreement with the Tokyo 2020 organizers to make an early decision on whether or not to allow foreign spectators at the games.

“The obvious reason is that it involves the ticketing program, and has impact on the arrangement of the spectators that may travel to Japan. It’s a question of safety and security of everyone,” Bach said through an interpreter.

Multiple media outlets have reported that the Tokyo organizers hope to keep foreign spectators away, with a recent poll by Yomiuri newspapers showing 77 percent of the 1,066 surveyed Japanese people opposed the entry of foreign spectators, and 48 percent of them hope the Games is held behind closed doors.

However, the IOC chief called for “leaving the door open” about how many spectators will eventually be allowed into the stadiums.

“This is a decision to be made as late as possible, simply to bear in mind the most recent development, so we need to leave the door open, to take into account all development that may take place, even in May and June. So there will be several stages regarding the decision-making,” he said.

Bach’s presidency has been through problems before, however.

“Let us not forget the sea of troubles we had to navigate since 2014,” Bach said, noting the year of the Sochi Games, which was tainted by Russia’s doping program.

Russian teams and athletes have been barred from competing under their nation’s name or flag in Tokyo as the latest punishment in fallout from the scandal.

Despite postponement costs for the Tokyo Games, Bach secured the IOC’s long-term future by extending key broadcasting and sponsor deals through 2032.

He also signed future Olympic hosts Paris and Los Angeles, while Brisbane, Australia, is now being fast-tracked for 2032 — a move aimed at avoiding expensive campaigns and allegations of vote buying.

The German has served his first term of office since being elected in September 2013, during which he pushed forward several reforms to the IOC and the Olympic Movement, including Olympic Agenda 2020 adopted in December 2014, under the mindset of “to change or to be changed.”

The Agenda, which values sustainability, credibility and youth, has enabled the IOC to “put money where our mouth is,” as Bach said in the closing report, which was approved unanimously by 95 valid votes.

The president highlighted achievement brought by the reform measures, including saved costs for bidding and organizing an Olympic Games, increased input to the Olympic Solidarity funds and anti-doping, new events popular among the younger generation at Paris 2024, and gender equality.

Bach announced Beijing as winner of the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in 2015 and announced at the same time in 2017, for the first time in the Olympic history, two future hosts, Paris 2014 and Los Angeles 2028.

The president expressed confidence that the Beijing 2022 organizing committee is ready for the winter sport spectacle.

“We could already see at the recent One-Year-to-Go celebrations that their technical preparations are in an excellent state,” Bach said.

“All the venues are completed. In fact, the test events for the mountain cluster just took place a few days ago. Despite the many challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, we can say already now with great confidence that the organizing committee is ready: ready to welcome the world’s best winter sport athletes for this global celebration of sport.”

He also geared the IOC to tackle challenges including mounting tension in the Korean Peninsula before PyeongChang 2018 and a joint decision with Japan to postpone the Tokyo 2020 for the historic first time facing the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“There is no doubt the opening ceremony [of Tokyo 2020] will take place July 23,” Bach reiterated in his opening remarks.

As an athlete, Bach was a world-class fencer, winning the Olympic gold medal, but also two gold medals with the German foil fencing team at the World Championships in Montreal in 1976 and in Buenos Aires in 1977. He was a founding member of the IOC Athletes’ Commission in 1981, on which he remained until 1988. In 1991, he became an IOC member and sat on the IOC Executive Board between 1996 and 2013. He served as IOC vice president from 2000 to 2004, 2006 to 2010 and from 2010 until his election as IOC president in September 2013.

During his presidency, he received the prestigious Seoul Peace Prize in October last year. In 2019, he was awarded the Cem-Papandreou Peace Award in Athens, which is given to individuals and groups who have made “an outstanding contribution to peace.”

When Bach walked off the stage in Buenos Aires as the newly elected IOC president in September 2013, he was given a phone to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Fallout from the Russian doping program that tainted the 2014 Sochi Winter Games five months later continues into Bach’s second term.

It was an “unprecedented attack on the integrity of the Olympic Games,” Bach said Wednesday.

At each Olympics since, because of increased vetting, Russia sent or will send fewer athletes or under a different name. The country’s team will be known as ROC (for Russian Olympic Committee) in Tokyo and at the 2022 Beijing Winter Games.

Russia’s punishments from the IOC and the Court of Arbitration for Sport could have been more severe. But Bach resisted a blanket ban from the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, a proposal urged by the World Anti-Doping Agency and by some athletes.

At the end of 2022, Russia’s current sanctions expire. The country will then be fully restored as a valuable hosting option for Olympic sports bodies.

The Summer Games is the Olympics for most sports fans, and it has given the Bach-run IOC serious challenges and its most radical decisions.

(SD-Agencies)