By David Owen in Buenos Aires
September 11 – The new President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has revealed in Buenos Aires that he is a keen football fan, even, as a youngster, preferring the sport to fencing, the activity in which he went on to win an Olympic gold medal.
Thomas Bach, the 59-year-old German who succeeded Jacques Rogge on Tuesday disclosed in his first media conference as IOC President at the Buenos Aires Hilton that, “When I started to become a fencer, I wanted to be a football player.
“I preferred playing football.”
In the end, Bach told journalists, his parents convinced him to attend his local fencing club by telling him the training he received there would help make him a better footballer.
Bach, who was born near Würzburg, now supports two clubs: the European champions, Bayern Munich and FC Nürnberg.
Bach, who won his gold medal at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, was elected IOC President in preference to five other candidates by colleagues including FIFA President Joseph Blatter and executive committee members Issa Hayatou and Lydia Nsekera.
Blatter was unable to vote owing to the presence on the ballot of a fellow Swiss candidate, Denis Oswald, who finished fourth.
Bach won the ballot on the second round of voting, polling 49 votes – an absolute majority of the 93 members who voted – against 29 votes for Richard Carrión, the IOC’s leading financial expert, six for Ser Miang Ng of Singapore, five for Oswald and four for Sergey Bubka, the former pole-vault champion.
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