There are few equivalents of the G7, Brics or the UN security council in sport, invitation-only clubs reserved for the wealthiest and most powerful. 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 that 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 that 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.
