John Coates, unique deliverer of two Olympics to Australia, steps away from NOC Presidency after more than 30 years

In early 1964, John Coates reportedly took a day off school to watch Richie Benaud play his last Test match. A photograph in the next day’s Sydney Morning Herald pictured him alongside the Australian cricket captain as they left the pitch.

Even then Coates, who will complete a 31-year innings as President of the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) next Saturday (April 30), knew when to follow his own agenda – and how to engage with the big players.

Now 71, Coates – who has also been a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) since 2001 – began his sporting career as a rowing cox. As a sports administrator he has guided his country to a dominant position within the Olympic Movement through a mixture of strategic vision, forcefulness and a large measure of what some might call guile – and others cunning.

As Michael Knight, who served as Olympics Minister and President of the Organising Committee at the time of the Sydney 2000 Games has since observed: “When you’re negotiating with Coates you find that he’s always got one more contract.”

Coates was born with a condition in which his hips were permanently dislocated from their sockets, a painful ailment that has made him around six centimetres shorter than he otherwise might have been. It has since been said of Coates that this lifelong disability “spurred him to greater effort.”

While the motivation remains debateable, however, the results have been incontestable. When this astute Sydney lawyer delivered what turned out to be a blissfully successful Olympics to his home city in 2000 he described it as his “Everest”.

And as he prepares to leave the position to which he was elected in 1990, he has taken his country to the heights again by effectively masterminding the choice of Brisbane to host the 2032 Games in the new IOC bidding landscape he has done so much to design.

Coates’s achievements have come at a cost. His has been an executive Presidency for which, it was reported in 2016, he had been receiving an annual salary of close to AUD700,000 (£393,000/$507,000/€470,000).

Reducing the level of that Presidential salary from AUD700,000 to AUD100,000 (£56,000/$72,000/€67,000) was part of a manifesto put forward by Coates’ most recent challenger for his AOC position, the former Australian women’s hockey player Danni Roche, in a bitter contest held in 2017.

Roche pledged to bring more transparency to the organisation, to improve its handing of bullying complaints and to foster a closer relationship between the AOC and the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) – for whom she was then director.

“There is certainly a strong desire for change,” Roche said. “There is a desire for the AOC to place a greater focus on providing for their sports and athletes and for it to have a more collaborative relationship with the National Federations and the Australian Sports Commission.”

Her arguments did not win the day, however, as Coates earned what he announced would be his final term by a 58-35 majority.

The Athletes’ Commission chair, Beijing 2008 pole vault champion Steve Hooker, said his organisation’s support for Coates was conditional on changes in the AOC.

“We’re happy that John is in, but also really pleased with Danni’s platform… and the conversations that she’s started,” Hooker said.

The “collaborative relationship” to which Roche referred was in spectacularly short supply during the 2017 Nitro Athletics event involving Usain Bolt in Melbourne, where Coates, who felt Roche’s challenge was a clear attempt at a takeover by the ASC, had a public row with the longstanding ASC chairman John Wylie, calling the latter a “cunt” and a liar.

Three years later Coates told the ABC podcast The Ticket: “I think that the role of the Sports Commission is as a service provider. I think it’s wrong for the Sports Commission to try and take control of the AOC. It was because of the money we have in the foundation.”

Much of that money had ended up in the AOC coffers through a uniquely smart move Coates had devised during the bid for the 2000 Olympics, when he had legally vouchsafed the organisation a veto on all sporting matters to do with the Games.

Once Sydney had won the Games, largely thanks to Coates’s energy and… guile… the arrangement proved increasingly unworkable in terms of meshing in with the overall efforts of the Organising Committee and so the AOC sold off its veto for what was reported to be around AUD100 million (£56 million/$72 million/€67 million).

That money financed a lot of Australian sportsmen and women and helped them achieve a lot of gold, silver and bronze in the years to come, not least the year of 2000.

Coates had begun his direct involvement in the Olympics at the Montreal Games of 1976, where he was manager of the Australian rowing team. Four years later, as a member of the AOC although not on the Executive Committee, he played a leading role in resisting calls from the Australian Government to join the boycott of the Moscow Olympics in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

He pointed out that the then Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, was still selling wool to Russia and questioned why it was that sport should be the chosen arena of sacrifice. “He wasn’t taking any hit himself,” he said of Fraser.

By 1985, Coates was AOC vice-president and threw himself into the ultimately futile task of bringing the 1992 Games to Brisbane.

Reminded of this in 2019, Coates told my colleague David Owen: “I believed what people said that we had something of a chance. It was not so much that we didn’t win, but it clearly taught me not to take at face value what IOC members at the time would say to you.

“I was young. I had moved my family up to Brisbane. I had put a lot into it. It did shatter me. I was tempted to go back to law. But I soon got back in the swing of things.”

That he certainly did.

Coates was Chef de Mission for the Australian team at each Summer Games from 1988 to 2008. He played a consulting role as Melbourne, again unsuccessfully, sought a return of the Olympics in 1996, 40 years after it had first staged the Games.

As the dial was re-set for the 2000 Games, in opposition to the widely perceived favourite in the race, Beijing, Coates became what Australian IOC member Kevan Gosper described as “the strategic mastermind of the Sydney bid”.

Having authored the Sydney 2000 strategy document, he focused on Africa and Eastern Europe, commenting: “That is where we had to pick up the votes.”

Over the years, Coates had become friendly with Sam Ramsamy, the South African who had been chairman of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee since the 1970s and took over as President of the country’s National Olympic Committee (NOC) in 1991, the year after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.

Coates recalls how Ramsamy helped him to plot an extensive trip through the continent, including a meeting with Mandela, accompanied by Gough Whitlam, the former Australian Prime Minister, and Whitlam’s wife Margaret.

“I think we probably got five or six votes [in Africa],” Coates said. “I don’t think Melbourne had got any.”

And there were other shots in the Coates locker, as one senior IOC figure told insidethegames: “They did one thing that was most unexpected. The reason for not going to Sydney was that it was too far away and it would cost too much money. And about six months before the vote they suddenly produced a guarantee that they would meet all the travelling expenses.

“With the best will in the world that blew most of the others out of the water. It was a brilliant move and I can only assume that John would have been involved in that.”

Coates has gone on record as saying that he knew Sydney would win even before arriving in Monaco in 1993 for the IOC vote. But his vigorous, last-minute efforts in the Principality – which he made public in the wake of the scandal which broke in late 1998 over the buying of votes during the bidding process for the 2002 Salt Lake Winter Games – spoke of a less comfortable attitude.

In January 1999, amid worldwide debate over the revelations about the Olympic bidding process, Coates released files detailing commitments made during his tour with Whitlam under a scheme to train African athletes.

Under it, Sydney’s Bid Committee paid AUD2million (£1.1million/$1.45million/€1.35million) to 11 African NOCs so they could send athletes to Australia to train in the years leading up to the Games.

Some of the money was granted unconditionally and some was pledged on the condition that Sydney won its bid.

But with the final issue still in doubt, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, Coates decided to make assurance double sure.

At a dinner on the last night before the IOC vote, he promised $35,000 (AUD48,000/£27,000/€32,000) extra to the Ugandan and Kenyan NOCs; but only if Sydney won. When Coates released the letters he was characteristically unrepentant, commenting: “I wasn’t going to die wondering why we didn’t win like we didn’t win with Brisbane and Melbourne.”

Sydney beat Beijing to the 2000 Games by 45 votes to 43. Coates had made it happen by doing what had to be done. Realpolitik.

“Nobody knew about it until the Salt Lake City scandal,” the senior IOC figure added. “And then of course there was a stink. It smelled. But it helped the AOC all right.

“There wasn’t much point in getting furiously upset because it was years later.”

Coates’ ploy regarding the veto had been unique – and the IOC was not amused. A few years down the line the London 2012 organisers found they were very carefully controlled in their joint marketing agreement. There was to be no repeat of the Great Sydney 2000 Ambush.

In an interview with the Australian Associated Press shortly before  London 2012, Sebastian Coe, then chairman of the Organising Committee, acknowledged the advice he had received from Sydney 2000 officials on his seven-year quest to firstly win and then stage the Games.

“John Coates is a wise old bird and I always remember him saying to me early on in this journey that if you get the athlete-generated atmosphere at the stadiums then the rest sort of happens,” Coe said.

“We have been really conscious of that. If you take as much of the operational difficulty as possible out of their lives you’ve got a good chance of them competing well.

“If they compete well the crowds are happy, and if the crowds are happy they leave the stadiums and, in your [Sydney’s] case, we all sat in Darling Harbour until four in the morning.

“That’s what I think we want out of this – to get it right for the athletes. Everything else pretty much follows.”

Without Sydney’s expertise, he added, he might have spent three years “sitting in front of parliamentary select committees explaining why I had spent £30 million ($39 million/€36 million) on a bid that finished second”.

Asked if Australia would have got the Sydney 2000 Games without Coates, the senior IOC figure responded promptly: “Almost certainly not.”

The result was to put Australian sport at the top table. Paul Keating, Australian Prime Minister at the time of the decisive IOC Session in Monte Carlo, commented: “This is an opportunity for Australia and Australians to show we can hack it in the big time.”

Coates also asserted that the successful staging of the Games “gained us a lot of friends and kudos within the Olympic Movement.” In addition, the event “transformed Australian sport in the lead-up to it”. The home team amassed 58 Olympic and a table-topping 149 Paralympic medals, including Cathy Freeman’s iconic 400 metres Olympic gold.

For many years Coates has worked closely the current IOC President Thomas Bach, from whom he took over chairmanship of the IOC Legal Commission. The two reportedly became “very firm friends”.

More recently Coates has been a central figure in shaping the IOC’s Agenda 2028, with its more consensual Games bidding process, a process partly prompted by Bach’s conviction that the costly and adversarial model of past years had produced “too many losers”. The hurts of Brisbane’s 1992 bid will never have been forgotten.

As in the Sydney 2000 bidding process, Coates was in at the ground level. He wrote the Agenda 2028 rules.

He had also, as it happened, been working quietly with Brisbane for a couple of years getting the city to think seriously about the transportation and infrastructure issues that would need to be sorted if it should ever wish to try for the Summer Games again.

And lo. It came to pass.

There is a school of thought that Coates manipulated things in this way to make sure that if he got the changes in the rules through and a new Commission decided to look at future bids, the following day there would be a phone call from Brisbane saying: “We’re always ready.”

Among those who have hailed Coates’ success in attracting not one but two Summer Games to his country is Juan Antonio Samaranch, whose father of the same name presided over the Movement’s commercial revolution as IOC President from 1980 to 2001.

Samaranch, who like Coates became an IOC member in 2001, highlights his colleague’s unique achievement.

“What John has meant to Australian sport is easy to answer,” Samaranch told insidethegames. “He has meant everything to Olympic sports in that country.

“He has organised extremely efficiently the teams to go to the Olympic Games, putting Australia very much up there with the top countries around the world, especially in the Summer Games.

“But not only that, he has managed to put Australia in the centre of Olympism for decades now. He was extremely important in getting the Games for Sydney in 2000. And right now in a completely different world many years later he really managed to convince the Olympic Movement of the merits of Brisbane for 2032.

“He did that in a very convincing way and we are proud of what he did, happy that he pushed for that idea, and now we are very comfortable to have that outcome for John and his people.

“He learned a lot from his first experience with Brisbane and managed to deliver two Games for his country with more than three decades between them.

“There is a third line of work for John that has not been related to Australia but to the Olympic Family at large. We really cannot overestimate the amount of work he has done as chair of the IOC Legal Commission, and as a very important member of the Executive Board for so long.

“Second only to Thomas Bach he is behind all these tremendous changes that are taking Olympism into the 21st century, setting the stepping stones for a successful future of the Movement.

“So he has had these three things. In terms of sport he has managed to create an extremely powerful sports machine that has produced extraordinary athletes and results for his country.

“Second, as a sports organiser put Australia centre stage for many, many years. From the fantastic Games in Sydney in 2000 to 2032 – this is a 32-year span of John Coates.

“And he has helped to shape the Olympic Movement – and more than that he has made it more efficient and better equipped for the challenges and threats of a very complicated world.

“So it is difficult to understand what the Olympic Family and the Olympic Movement would be without John.

“He has been able to exercise his leadership by convincing people around him that that would be the way to go.

“He is very powerful in bringing people up and getting them convinced that people should continue with their own ideas but be doing something by consensus.

“I think he has been an example of how to get things done. I am not saying it was always done by consensus, I mean he is a very powerful man and has a very strong character and will. But he has always tried to convince people.”

Now the mantle of AOC Presidency will pass to one of two contenders. One is Ian Chesterman, a veteran of the Australian Olympic Movement who was the team’s Chef de Mission at Tokyo 2020 and has served in that position at six Winter Olympics. Chesterman is also a current AOC vice-president.

The other is former swimmer Mark Stockwell, a triple Olympic medallist at the Los Angeles 1984 Games, who chaired the Organising Committee for the highly successful Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games.

Stockwell sees himself as a healing presence in the wake of a turbulent 2017 AOC election, in which factions aligned behind either Coates or former Hockeyroo Roche, who presented a challenger for Coates for the first time since 1990.

“I want to heal the relationships between the sports, the Olympic Movement, Sport Australia,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “We are on the same team here, so let’s work together.

“Sport is part of the fabric of this nation. But we’re losing it, participation is declining. We’re in trouble. Talent is heading to those high-performance sports, and they are very well run. We have to fight for it. It’s as simple as leadership.

“I’ve been involved in the Olympic Movement for 40 years now. I’ve never been on the board of the Australian Olympic Committee. But I’m deeply embedded in Olympic sport and high-performance sport.

“You have to be statesmanly in bringing people together around an idea. Then you have to have the energy to get up every morning and make it happen.”

Matching what John Coates has made happen to Australian in the space of more than three decades will take some doing.