Thomas Bach

handle this is acceptable and actually the way I prefer it to be.

Would it have helped if our prime minister had gone down to Lausanne and met up with, at the time then, Thomas Bach? I don't know.

And I don't think it matters.

who would have been the prime minister at the time.

Rachel Naylor has been speaking to one of the athletes from that first team.

It's March 2016 and the International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach has just announced that a team of refugee athletes will compete at the Rio Games.

We want to send a message of hope for all refugees of the world.

These refugee athletes have no national team to belong to.

I haven't got used to running with shoes, you know.

Fortunately, she did get the hang of it.

And after nine months of training, IOC President Thomas Bach announced which 10 refugees from around the world would be going to the Rio Olympics.

And Rose was one of them.

Yes, I think it is absolutely a good thing.

And I think probably Thomas Bach, for all the good that he no doubt did for the Olympic movement and the strong position in which he left the IOC when he stepped down as president for Kirsty Coventry, Last

year? The year

before? This move towards behind closed doors, tying up of host cities for the Olympics.

Cities started dropping out.

So Thomas Bach, the former president, awarded 2024 and '28 at the same time, and then, then we got this new host city selection where hosts talked kinda on the sly behind the scenes.

If you wanted to host, you told the, uh, IOC, they started talking with you, and if things looked good, you started filling out questionnaires and, and sharing your information and what you had, and you moved from different strategic dialogue phase to a targeted dialogue phase, I think.

I d- I don't know.

I think that's a good word.

Under Thomas Bach, the IOC had been very much focused on being a force for good in the world, right? For lack of a better way to describe it.

working with UN, working with other groups to spread sport as a way to promote peace, as a way to promote not necessarily politics, right? I mean, that's certainly never been a stated goal of the IOC, but in a way it was, right? Let's open China up to the world.

Let's bring sport there, right? And let's do it again, even though there's a lot more concern now about the ability of sport to make the kinds of changes you would want to see in a place that was accused of repressing some of its peoples, right? It seems like she's really moved away from that.