A renewed IOC learned one vital lesson in Paris: Controversy is good – and necessary – for business

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Back in London 2012, the Olympics’ topline problem was doping. A hundred and 30 or so competitors – everyone from judokas to hurdlers – were eventually sanctioned there. A dozen more were banned before they could even enter the Games.

It was a big existential crisis – and it was about to get much worse in Sochi. When the Russians set up their urine-swapping operation in the midst of the Olympic Park, they must have thought they were hidden in the doping fog. It almost worked.

How many athletes were eventually punished for doping at the Winter Olympics in Beijing in 2022? Four. That included a 15-year-old figure skater I doubt was making those decisions herself.

The Olympics didn’t get rid of doping. The dopers either got smarter or doping went out of fashion. Probably a bit of both.

It still happens – ask the Chinese swimming team about how easy it is to get filled to the gills with banned heart medication by eating at the hotel buffet. But doping is not a thing any more. When it happens now, the news is greeted ruefully, rather than with panic.

The long arc of doping anxiety taught the International Olympic Committee a lesson: Controversy is good for business.

Watching the IOC stumbling and bumbling its way through the gender crisis in boxing at these Games, you got the same feeling. Surely it saw this coming. How could it not?

But the administrative reaction was astonishment. When IOC president Thomas Bach was finally roused to address it, he got it wrong, confusing “transgender” with “DSD” (differences in sex development).

Delightfully, he did that right after saying, “I will not confuse the two issues.”

Bach wasn’t out there changing hearts and minds. Nobody can do that, never mind a charisma-free apparatchik from Germany. The real function of Bach’s address was to keep the controversy smouldering.

However you feel about Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s inclusion in the Games, you will concede one thing: The story hooked you. You probably read about it or talked about it or watched it. Possibly all three.

When was the last time you watched boxing? Forever, I’m guessing. The worldwide numbers on Khelif’s gold-medal bout have got to be up there with any Floyd Mayweather fight.

All to say, agita makes the Olympics stronger. The more complex and divisive the source of the agitation, the better.

Other sports leagues can’t handle combustible issues in the same way because those leagues do one thing. A blow-up in one part of the operation affects the workings all the way down the line.

The Olympics do everything. You don’t want to argue about sex testing? No problem. How do you like gymnastics? That’s a nice change of pace. Or breaking? Do you like music? Because this has that. No dopers, guaranteed.

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Without controversy, the couple of years between Games become arid. What are we supposed to talk about? How great the coffee’s going to be in Milan-Cortina?

Instead, we will spend the next two years yelling at each other about gender in sport and how the Olympics must lead on this issue. The IOC will sit Buddha-like on the sidelines, issuing a few words of wisdom every so often. Those will stir the debate whenever it looks like calming down or, worse, boring people.

Throughout, the Olympics’ primacy will be affirmed. You don’t see anyone berating the world boxing championships, and that’s where this mess started.

But to do such a thing at the Olympics? Dear God, no, this cannot be allowed to happen – whatever “this” happens to be right now. There’s always a “this.” It’s constantly changing. Without it, the Olympics is just a track and field meet with great staging.

Cathal Kelly: Paris Olympics feel incomplete without the sporting event’s antagonist, Russia

So how does the Olympic movement emerge from its first Games after COVID? Renewed in its purpose and stronger than ever.

Remember how everybody used to freak out about the Olympics and money and how no one could afford to, nor wanted to, hold them any more? That’s over, too.

The Olympics have their hosting ducks lined up for the next decade – Milan-Cortina, Los Angeles, the French Alps, Brisbane, Salt Lake City.

While you can’t say for certain these will all be great Olympics, you do know that the hosts can afford to put them on. That’s another source of controversy neutralized for a generation.

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The next frontier for the IOC is negotiating the return of Russia. The few Russians who showed up in Paris made zero impression. No one missed the ones who didn’t. Their role as Olympic spoiler is over.

It may not happen for years, but when Russia does eventually come crawling back – and it will – it will be a diplomatic coup for whomever is in charge. It won’t be Bach. He’ll be replaced early next year.

This is the real mission of the IOC: to be acknowledged as the most important non-state actor in sports. To be the one who sets the tone (chilly politeness) and decides which issues deserve oxygen. To lay its healing hand on the world’s tired and poor (you and me).

Rescuing Russia from its own corruption and warmongering would be the ultimate act of Olympic munificence. Though it’s impossible to imagine how, it’s almost beginning to feel as though the IOC planned it this way. What the President of the United States could not do with threats will some day be done with luge.

This grandiosity would seem tacky anywhere else, but not at the Olympics, where they literally garland their champions. The Olympics are about being as big as possible. Big production values. Big ideas. Big arguments.

When you’re big, people take big swings at you. The IOC has come to realize that it’s not the swings you need to worry about. It’s when the swinging stops.