Olympic politics, intrigue and sports marketing history recounted in IOC insider's new book

MILAN—From Cold-War boycotts to the helmet of a Ukrainian skeleton racer that ignited the Milan-Cortina slopes this month, Olympic Games have rarely unfolded far from geopolitical crossfire. Now a veteran architect of the modern Olympic movement is pulling back the curtain on four decades of back-room bargaining, billion-dollar broadcast deals and the marketing revolution that kept the five rings solvent.

In “Fast Tracks and Dark Deals,” Michael Payne—the International Olympic Committee’s former marketing director—traces his improbable journey from British freestyle skier to the Lausanne headquarters where, beginning in 1988, he helped transform an event once teetering on insolvency into a sponsorship juggernaut that generated roughly $3 billion in cash and services for the 2024 Paris cycle alone.

“There has always been political clouds and issues impacting the Olympic Games,” Payne told The Associated Press during a series of interviews ahead of the book’s release. “It’s the one time every two or four years you bring the whole world together with a media platform second to none.”

That platform was thrust into sharp relief at these Winter Games when Ukraine’s Vladyslav Heraskevych was disqualified after displaying a memorial helmet calling for peace in his homeland. IOC President Kirsty Coventry’s dawn-trackside appeal to the athlete ended in tears and global headlines, underscoring what Payne calls the “political oxygen” unique to sport.

“The IOC didn’t have a choice,” he writes, arguing that allowing an overt political statement would have opened the door to pressure from “nations with disproportionate influence over their athletes” and complicated preparations for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Political tightrope walking is nothing new to Payne. He recalls learning the craft under Juan Antonio Samaranch, the IOC president who served 21 years until 2001 and who kept North Korea engaged long enough to safeguard the 1988 Seoul Summer Games during South Korea’s democratic transition. “Machiavellian genius,” Payne calls the Spaniard, alongside Adidas scion Horst Dassler and Formula One magnate Bernie Ecclestone—power brokers who populate the memoir’s rollicking anecdotes.

Among them: shutting down a glowing McDonald’s arch outside Atlanta’s 1996 opening ceremony to preserve the IOC’s “clean venue” policy; negotiating billion-dollar U.S. television contracts; and a surreal meeting with Rupert Murdoch in Manhattan that helped reshape Olympic media strategy.

Payne’s fingerprints are on The Olympic Partner (TOP) program, launched after the financially successful 1984 Los Angeles Games. The first four-year cycle, 1985-88, netted $96 million; by Paris 2024 the figure had multiplied thirty-fold. Resistance was fierce—“Americans saw it as diverting American money to the communists,” Payne notes, while Eastern-bloc officials feared budget escalation. Yet global sponsors from Coca-Cola to Alibaba now underwrite athlete scholarships, host-city payments and National Olympic Committees worldwide.

“People forget how close the Olympics came to dying, just slowly shriveling up,” Payne said. “We were not fully out of the woods until Barcelona ’92.”

Today, as sponsors press for relaxed venue-advertising rules, Coventry has ordered a marketing review. Payne, who left the IOC in 2004, believes periodic recalibration is healthy. “Like any company or organization, it needs sometimes to take stock,” he writes.

Whether the Ukraine helmet controversy delays the IOC’s timetable for reinstating the suspended Russian Olympic Committee remains uncertain. What is clear from Payne’s account is that politics, money and spectacle have always been fellow travelers on the Olympic road—and that the road, however bumpy, still commands the world’s attention.

“People still care about the Olympics,” he insists. “They still want it to succeed.”

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