Significant changes to the Olympic program could be on the way if Ng Ser Miang has his way and becomes the next International Olympic Committee president.
“It is also about time for us to do a major review of the size, the cost, the scale and the complexity of the Games,” Ng told Reuters on Monday. “This will be one of the priority for sure. Even on the bid itself, the process. Whether we can make it more efficient, less costly with more respect to the cities to those bidding as well as for the sports themselves.
“But at the same time, when we talk about reducing the size of the Games there are more sports knocking on the door wanting to be part of it, so I think there is going to be a fine balance and we have got to find the optimum solution.”
Ng, 64, an IOC member from Singapore, is one of six candidates to succeed IOC president Jacques Rogge, whose term ends this year. The IOC will elect a new president on Sept. 10 in Buenos Aires.
The other candidates are German Thomas Bach, Ukraine’s Sergey Bubka, Puerto Rico’s Richard Carrion, Taiwan’s Wu Ching-kuo and Switzerland’s Denis Oswald.
Ng also said potential new Olympic sports should test themselves through the Youth Olympics first and that the number of sports could be increased from 26 but with fewer medals available, according to Reuters.
The number of total events at recent Olympics were as follows: 302 in 2012, 303 in 2008, 301 in 2004, 300 in 2000, 271 in 1996, 257 in 1992 and 237 in 1988. The first modern Olympics in 1896 had 43 events. (all numbers courtesy of sports-reference.com/olympics).
“There could be a review on number of athletes, different disciplines, there could be a review of disciplines in the existing sports,” Ng told Reuters. “There could be a more optimum allocation of scheduling of competitions. I believe that there are some opportunities there for us to look at so we have to, definitely, consider some of these.”
