. From athletics to swimming, rowing to basketball, football to fencing, almost all international federations adhere to the principle of “one nation, one vote”. As a Fifa executive once put it to me: “If people find it strange that the vote of a small Caribbean country should count for as much as Germany’s or Brazil’s, what would they say if Bill Gates’s vote counted for more than his gardener’s in a US election?”
Touché. The question arises, then, of why this model of radical democracy has led to what we see today: a number of international sports bodies which are run like fiefdoms by presidents who are routinely re-elected for term after term without opposition, autocrats in all but name. The answer is that, if all the votes count the same, some voters are more equal than others. More to the point, many of them, the majority in fact, are less equal than others. They are the federations of smaller, poorer countries which are financially dependent on the funding provided by their sport’s governing body. The power bestowed on them by the electoral system ends up being used to prop up their benefactor.
And so it is that sport will almost certainly soon witness the triumphant return of Alisher Usmanov, the man who had reigned unchallenged over world fencing since 2008, when he was first elected president of the International Fencing Federation (FIE), until he had to step down from his position in March 2022. The former minority shareholder of Arsenal and patron of Everton FC, described by The Official Journal of the European Union as a “pro-Kremlin oligarch with particularly close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin […] one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite oligarchs”, …
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