The Race to Olympia: Bach puts on brave face as rain pounds down at cradle of Olympism

This week's election to choose a successor to Thomas Bach begun with some pomp and ceremony at the opening of the 144th IOC Session in Olympia. David Owen joined the Olympic bigwigs

Ancient Olympia is located in one of the greenest and most fertile parts of Greece. We acquired a better understanding of why this might be on Tuesday as the weather gods rained relentlessly down on Thomas Bach’s last Opening Ceremony as International Olympic Committee President.

The German put a brave face on it, alluding to the saturated Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony, which preceded a “spectacular” Olympic Games, and also the weather-affected reopening ceremony of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, before remarking: “Now the rain is back with us, nothing can go wrong any more”.

He was speaking in an open-sided marquee at the prestigious Olympic Academy “right next to the first-ever Olympic Stadium”, as he put it. One imagines he might have preferred the grandiosity that the stadium itself would have provided, but not in weather more readily associated with Peterborough than the Peloppones, even this olive-and orange-grove-festooned corner of it.