Jacques Rogge, the right president at the right time and the man who helped Lionel Messi when he needed it

Every era has its leader. Juan Antonio Samaranch arrived to change the history of the Olympic Games and prevent them from slowly fading away. Thomas Bach, 33 years after the Spaniard’s rise, brought the Games back from a certain dangerous path they were beginning to tread. But without Jacques Rogge, the man who led the Olympics between 2001 and 2013, everything would have been much more thankless and difficult. For Samaranch and for Bach. 

Without Rogge, the calm-spoken and leisurely Belgian, what Samaranch built between 1980 and 2001 would have been more difficult to sustain. And without Rogge, the inventor of the Youth Olympic Games, Bach would have found it much harder to revamp the Games and bring surfing, skateboarding and sport climbing to Tokyo 2020.

“He will undoubtedly be remembered for being the creator and father of the Youth Olympic Games,” Argentina’s Gerardo Werthein, a member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its executive committee, noted in a statement Sunday.

Buenos Aires hosted those Games in 2018, and Rogge enjoyed them as honorary president and spectator in the Argentine capital.

Those Youth Games, which the Belgian had already promoted during his years at the head of the European Olympic Committee (EOC) became - and still are - the ideal laboratory for the IOC to anticipate and prevent the premature aging of the Olympic Games, which are already 125 years old.

Rogge, who introduced the custom of the IOC president moving into the Olympic Village during the Games, “loved sport and being with the athletes,” said his successor, Bach. “His joy in sport was infectious.”

But sport - as Samaranch, Rogge and Bach himself experienced or are experiencing - is not always happiness. 

When the Belgian arrived at the highest position in world sport, the Salt Lake City corruption scandal was still raging. Three months later, the world changed its course with the attacks of September 11, 2001. And in between - before, during and after - doping cases were shaking the credibility of sport and the IOC.

Rogge’s decision to promote Richard Pound as president of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was one of the smartest steps of his mandate, because the Canadian found a chair in line with his abilities after failing to reach the one in Lausanne where the Belgian ended up sitting.

Finally, soccer and the Games owe something very important to Rogge: Lionel Messi’s Olympic gold medal with the Argentine national team in Beijing 2008.

Barcelona did not want to release the Argentine for those Games, but Rogge, during an interview with the German news agency dpa, gave him a boost that Messi is probably unaware of, but which was decisive. 

“FIFA has just reminded clubs that they must release players,” Rogge said during the interview in Lausanne. “The law states that if a team does not release a player, then the player is suspended for the entire period of the Games. That means that the player will not be able to play for his club. “

Beyond some legal nuances, Rogge was right, and those words were a tremendous jolt to the Spanish club: Messi had a right to be at the Games. Josep Guardiola convinced the then and now president, Joan Laporta, that this was the way forward. Without Rogge and Guardiola, Messi would not have an Olympic gold among his trophies.

And no, Messi does not know it, but it was fate that on the very day his life changed when he made his debut in the Paris Saint-Germain jersey, Rogge, the man who helped him, said goodbye to this world.

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