It’s late on Sunday afternoon when SportsPro pulls into Lausanne on a train from Geneva, which means there’s only one place to aim for: the lake.
Even as the sun is starting to set, there is still plenty of activity on the waterfront. As this correspondent (very) gently jogs along the path, periodically checking Google Maps to make sure he is still heading loosely in the direction of Saint-Sulpice, locals are still out on paddleboards, returning from tennis courts and passing a rugby ball between each other.
They don’t call this the Olympic Capital for nothing. After all, nearly 60 international sports organisations and federations are stationed in Lausanne and the surrounding Canton of Vaud, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC).
Leaders from many of those organisations assembled at the Olympic Museum from 5th to 7th October for the SportAccord Forum, which was rebranded this year from the IF Forum to reflect the broader range of delegates, with destinations and service providers also in attendance for the 20th edition of the event.
After sitting in on sessions, conducting interviews and capturing additional content as the exclusive content partner of the event, SportsPro picks out some of the key takeaways from a productive three days in Switzerland.
Decentralised Winter Olympics offers lessons for the future
The first panel of the Forum put winter sports front and centre on the back of the most geographically dispersed Olympics in history.
Held in February this year, Milano Cortina 2026 saw competition spread across existing venues in clusters throughout Northern Italy to minimise the need for new infrastructure. That helped keep costs down, but it also meant a different experience for athletes, fans and other stakeholders.
After seeing her sport stationed in Cortina, alongside skiing and curling, International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) president Heike Grösswang looked back positively on the experience, but stressed the importance of ensuring those attending the Games still feel at the heart of the action.
That extended to encouraging officials to walk – rather than drive – back from the sliding centre to soak up the atmosphere.
“It didn’t matter if it was 10:30, 11 o’clock at night, we walked through Cortina and there were fans outside,” she said. “So we all could feel what makes the Olympics special, which is this feeling of people coming from all over the world.”
Skeleton and bobsleigh events at the 2026 Winter Olympics took place in Cortina (Image credit: Getty Images)
Change afoot for the Olympic programme
There wasn’t a spare seat in the house as two senior IOC officials – Christophe Dubi, executive director of the Olympic Games, and sports director Pierre Ducrey – took to the stage to shed more light on the body’s ‘Fit for the Future’ strategy, with federations clearly keen to understand what the changes mean for them.
Published in June following the 146th IOC Session, the strategy includes a new methodology to determine the Olympic programme, which is of particular interest to the IFs, many of whom are reliant on the IOC’s revenue distributions from the Games. Speaking on the opening day of the Forum, IOC president Kirsty Coventry said the approach provides “a much more precise and evidence-based way to look at the programme”.
Starting from Brisbane 2032, the core programme will be confirmed seven years out from each Games, with disciplines – rather than sports – assessed against their global appeal, cost and operational complexity, and athlete representation. Meanwhile, sports that drop off the programme will have an opportunity to be reinstated in the next cycle, while accompanying measures are designed to soften the financial blow for affected federations.
Some of the finer details are still to be worked out. But with Coventry saying previously that Brisbane will have fewer than the 36 sports featuring in LA, there was a sense that change is coming.
AI is the car – but data is the fuel
Prior to the Forum, the IOC published its Trustworthy AI Framework for the Olympic Movement, providing principles and tools that organisations can use when developing or using artificial intelligence (AI) systems, covering areas like safeguarding, data protection and reliability.
That very much set the tone for the three days in Lausanne, where there was unsurprisingly an acknowledgement that AI is not something that federations can afford to ignore. It was fitting, then, that one session was dedicated to technology, offering IFs some practical advice on how best to approach it.
While many sports leaders are embracing AI for personal use, what quickly became clear is that the pace of organisation-wide adoption varies between federations. But what if an AI strategy doesn’t start with AI at all?
That was the argument put forward by Sanjit Atwal, co-founder of sports data agency Halfspace.
“If AI is the car, data is the fuel,” he said. “AI doesn’t work without data. There is nothing for it to generate. There is nothing for it to reference against.
“So AI is not your strategy. It is an output of your strategy towards a defined outcome.”
Atwal, whose background is in ecommerce, did not mince his words when asked whether sport has effectively exploited its data in the past, arguing that the industry in general has done “an atrocious job” and is well behind other sectors.
Atwal advised that federations won’t feel the benefits of AI unless they have a robust data strategy underpinning it. Once those foundations are in place, AI can take on analysis that would otherwise be arduous to do.
“Data collection now shouldn’t be a scary thing to any IF, whatever size,” Atwal said. “It’s cheaper than ever to collect data. We have fantastic frameworks on which to do this.
“Then, what AI is fantastic at is educating you in how you can use that, and how you can start to drive up your organisation.”
Participation is the prize
SportsPro chief executive Nick Meacham opened day two of the forum, delivering some hard truths as he outlined nine challenges and six opportunities for international sport.
He saved what he described as the biggest opportunity until last.
More than 1.3 million people applied for the 2027 London Marathon ballot, with the race set to expand to two days and 100,000 runners next year. Elsewhere, Gothenburg’s half marathon sold 48,000 places in just 48 hours, and Hyrox recorded around 1.5 million race entries last season.
All this, he said, is evidence of how sports participation is on the rise.
“People want community,” Meacham said. “People want a goal. They want a reason to come back.”
Participants will happily pay for experiences that matter, yet much of this growth is currently happening outside traditional sporting structures. With Two Circles research suggesting almost half of all sports fans are made by the age of 14, Meacham added: “The people taking part today are your audience ten years from now.”
The end of transactional hosting
The SportAccord Forum closed with the first-ever City Forum, encouraging open dialogue between federations, events and the destinations that host them.
One theme that ran through the afternoon was that the transactional hosting model of old, whereby an IF would offer a finished product and a destination would decide whether to pay, belongs to a different era.
Cities now open negotiations by asking what an event will do for their communities, and who will be better off as a result. The release of public funding is increasingly dependent on alignment with a destination’s wider priorities, ranging from inclusion and gender equality to sustainability and public health.
The strongest hosting partnerships therefore start with a shared strategy. One panellist suggested that the first step should be agreeing what success looks like for both parties, then designing the contract, event and legacy around it, rather than leading with the financials.
As the Forum drew to a close, the overarching takeaway was that modern hosting partnerships should be built on shared goals rather than one-off transactions – and that’s perhaps no bad thing.
The SportAccord Forum was held under Chatham House Rule. Quotes used in this article have been approved or published elsewhere.