Power, politics, and the IOC: The case of Ng Ser Miang and World Sailing

Whoever wins the presidential election at the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in March 2025 will be the most powerful leader of the Olympic movement. However, IOC vice presidents also have significant power over sports governance that is rarely subject to public scrutiny and does not receive as much media attention as the power of the IOC president. 

An important case in point is Ng Ser Miang, an IOC member from Singapore who was IOC vice president from 2009 to 2013 and again from 2020 to 2024. 

In November 2022, World Sailing found Ser Miang guilty of abusing his positions as respectively IOC vice president and member of World Sailing’s Ethics Commission to interfere in the federation’s presidential election in November 2020 - an election campaign which has been framed in the media as 'one of the most bitter ever staged by an Olympic International Federation'. 

World Sailing later handed Ser Miang a warning and a fine of 1.000 euros for taking part in a smear campaign against the incumbent president, Kim Andersen of Denmark, who lost the election to Ser Miang's favourite, Quanhai Li of China, by 68 votes to 60. 

Although Ser Miang hasn’t been a member of a World Sailing federation since December 2020, he never lost his position in the governance of Olympic sailing. According to multiple sources in World Sailing, the IOC member is still an influential and powerful figure in the federation. 

According to the sources, Ser Miang was secretly pulling the strings as kingmaker in a new presidential election campaign at World Sailing’s annual conference in November 2024 which secured Li four more years as head of the federation. The IOC member was even invited to the annual conference as a guest of honour at the 2024 World Sailing Awards. 

A highly politicised case within World Sailing  

The smear campaign against Andersen prior to the 2020 election damaged the Dane's campaign for a second term as president of the federation and included three complaints of unethical conduct made against him.  
 
However, one year later, two of the three complaints against Andersen were dismissed by World Sailing, and the third complaint was withdrawn. 

Moreover, on 29 November 2022, World Sailing found in favour of Andersen’s complaints against Ser Miang and another member of the Ethics Commission, Dieter Neupert, for conflicts of interest and failure to act with utmost integrity, honesty, and responsibility in their handling of the ethics cases against the Dane. 

World Sailing’s independent panel stated that “it is clear that this case was highly politicised within World Sailing” to influence the result of the 2020 presidential election. 

“The allegations made against Mr Andersen at the time, which were not substantiated, but which caused damage to his reputation, and for which Mr Andersen complained, with good reason, demonstrated that there had been a campaign to influence the election and cause harm to his reputation,” the independent panel concluded in its decision. 

A governance reform and a new code of ethics

Even though Ser Miang and Neupert were both given a warning and a fine of 1.000 euros each, neither of them accepted the sanctions, and World Sailing apparently let the two get away with it at the same time as the federation was busy working on a governance reform including a new code of ethics, which was approved in 2022 and fully implemented in 2024. 

World Sailing’s governance reform includes the establishment of a new independent disciplinary tribunal which replaces its former judicial board and ethics commission, a new independent investigations panel, and a revised whistleblowing mechanism. 

When the governance reform was approved in 2022, Li said he was grateful to the national member organisations for trusting the international federation to lead the sport into a new era: 

“This is a decision which has united the World Sailing family and marks an important step in our journey. I am very pleased that we have seized the opportunity to modernise the sport’s decision-making,” Li said in a World Sailing statement.   
 
David Graham, the chief executive officer of World Sailing, added: 

“These changes will enable us to deliver a better service for our members, building on excellent work in the last two years to strengthen trust between World Sailing and our stakeholders inside and outside of the sport.” 

However, considering that Andersen was still fighting for legal justice at the time when his Chinese successor held Olympic meetings with Ser Miang and even awarded Neupert a medal, it is fair to question whether World Sailing’s governance reform is worth trusting. 

Awarded World Sailing’s Gold Medal of Honor  

In January 2023, after World Sailing had made the sanctions against Ser Miang and Neupert public, Ser Miang told The Straits Times that he didn’t accept the sanctions: 

“World Sailing has no jurisdiction over me after December 2020. I have not taken part in any of their proceedings and reject any allegations and sanctions made against me by World Sailing.” 

However, three months later Li met with Ser Miang in Beijing to present a progress report on the growth of e-sailing and “exchange ideas for the further growth of e-sailing and avenues for collaboration between the IOC and World Sailing ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games”, and the new president of World Sailing didn’t seem to have any problem with Neupert either. 

In November 2021, one year after the smear campaign against Andersen that paved the way for the election of Li as president, Neupert proudly announced on the website of his Swiss law firm that he was “awarded the Gold Medal of Honor by the President of the World Sailing federation, Quanhai Li”. 

To avoid paying the fine of 1.000 euros, Neupert also filed an application dated 30 April 2024, to the London High Court of Justice claiming that the fine wasn’t legal because World Sailing is governed by English law and not legally authorised to hand out fines. On 14 May 2024, the court accepted Neupert’s claim and ordered that the fine be void and of no effect. 

In an e-mail to Play the Game, Neupert explains his court application by saying that he decided “to take action against the revenge campaign paid by Kim Andersen with all the false accusations against Ser Miang and myself”. 

A prominent individual in international sport

Play the Game has also contacted Ser Miang by e-mail and invited him to comment on World Sailing’s sanctions against him and his present role in Olympic sailing, but the IOC member hasn’t responded to the invitation. 

However, when Play the Game asked World Sailing to explain why an IOC member who has been sanctioned for a smear campaign against an incumbent president of the federation was invited to the World Sailing Awards, Scott Dougal, Director of Communications, said: 

“Ser Miang was invited to attend the World Sailing Awards as a guest of the Singapore Sailing Federation and World Sailing because he is a prominent individual in international sport and a Singapore national. It is routine for World Sailing to invite prominent individuals from international sport to attend the World Sailing Awards.” 

In other words, World Sailing routinely found Ser Miang so prominent that he was invited to the annual conference where World Sailing’s governance reform “which will enable the federation to be more efficient and increase transparency in line with the requirements of a modern global sporting body”, as stated in a World Sailing statement, were fully implemented.

Ironically, the relationship between World Sailing and Ser Miang became even more transparent one month after the re-election of Li as president at the annual conference.   

An Olympic relationship worth £3 million a year  

On 11 December 2024, Li was invited to the Olympic House in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was presented with an IOC Presidential Award by IOC president Thomas Bach to mark “a very successful quadrennial in World Sailing” and “its contribution to the Paris 2024 Olympics” as well as his “election to serve his second term in office”. 

Ser Miang was present at the IOC event in Lausanne, which cemented the strong personal and economic relationship between the IOC and World Sailing. But to find out exactly how much the Olympic relationship between Ser Miang and World Sailing is worth to the international federation, Play the Game examined the federation’s budget for the year 2025. 

No less than 3 million GBP of World Sailing’s expected total income of 5.6 million GBP in 2025 is Olympic money distributed to Olympic sports federations by the IOC. The fact that more than half of World Sailing’s income is from the IOC may explain why Ser Miang is so important to the federation that he managed to topple its president and get away with it. 

An important chaperone for World Sailing  

To learn more about why Ser Miang is still an influential and well-connected figure in World Sailing, Play the Game asked a member of the Belgian federation who knows Ser Miang very well because he has been a close friend of his family for decades. 

Phillippe Rogge is a former president of the Finn Class and challenged Li at World Sailing’s 2024 presidential election but lost by 55 votes to 29. He is the son of late IOC president Jacques Rogge, who was also a Finn sailor and a friend of Ser Miang. 

“It has been important for World Sailing to have Ser Miang as a chaperone for the sport. I cannot say that I fully understand why or who he got agonistic with in the Andersen case. But then of course, when he got on the wrong side of people and vice versa, he was very exposed,” Rogge explains. 

“He had much more to lose than anybody else, because using your influence as an IOC member also makes you vulnerable. An article about an IOC member is not just going to the sailing press. It is also going to the world press.” 

According to Rogge, individual members of World Sailing federations have had many fights in the past over the governance of their sport, but the 2020 presidential election was “a mud fight of a different order of magnitude” and very damaging for the sport. 

“Sailing is a sport with traditional values and a code of honour. It used to be a gentleman’s sport. All of that went out of the window. You have a gentleman’s club where members dress up in a suit and tie, and then you realise that if they get really drunk or really upset, they could take a knife behind the bar and stab someone in the back,” Rogge says. 

“We did not have a rule that said, let us keep the knives in the drawer, let us make sure the glasses are in plastic because they might throw them at you.” 

A new breach of the election rules

To avoid a repeat of the mud fight in 2020, World Sailing created an independent election committee in November 2023 and appointed four members with extensive experience in risk and oversight positions to oversee that the 2024 presidential election was conducted without violations of the federation's election rules and code of ethics. 

In addition, World Sailing also appointed four members of an election disciplinary panel in September 2024 to ensure that any alleged breaches of the election rules were processed in accordance with the rules. 

But despite all World Sailing’s commitments to good governance, a new breach of the election rules was exposed by the independent election committee on the eve of the 2024 presidential election at the federation’s annual conference in November.  

The evening before the presidential election, the election committee became aware of a dinner organised by the Asian Sailing Federation (ASAF) at the Hotel Momentus Alexandre in Singapore. Based on statements and observations at the hotel, the election committee found that the dinner was in breach of the election rules. 

According to the election rules “during the campaign period, except with the permission of the election committee, no debate or public meeting (held virtually or in person) of any kind may be organised to promote a candidate”. In particular, the committee considered that “it was highly inappropriate not to seek its advice or permission in advance”. 

The election rules also state that “save for nominal gifts of under 20 euros value, a candidate shall not give cash, presents, offer donations or gifts, or grant advantages of whatever nature to procure support for their candidature”, and that “concealed promotion of a candidate in the form of technical meetings or other events is not permitted”. 

Conflicts of interest in sports is an iceberg  

However, in the circumstances, the election committee decided that the breach could not be considered more than minor and found that a notice of concern was appropriate to inform World Sailing’s national member associations about the issue. 

“We had heard about the dinner, and we didn’t think it was appropriate the night before the election. We had also been contacted by another group of members who wanted to hold an event. They asked us in accordance with the rules and we had said no to them,” Margot Foster, chair of World Sailing’s independent election committee, told Play the Game. 

During the investigation, the members of the election committee were told that World Sailing president Li attended the ASAF dinner, but Foster says they didn’t see the president at the dinner when they arrived at the hotel to investigate the matter. 

However, to her, it was relevant to inform World Sailing member federations of the dinner in a notice of concern because the dinner was a breach of the rules, and independent oversight of elections in sports is all about trust. 

 “It is important for members of sports organisations to understand and know that the people who are being elected are being elected fairly and not because of bribery, corruption, and graft,” the Australian said. 

Foster, a former lawyer with extensive governance experience in sport and a 1984 Olympic medallist in rowing, added: 

“Playing sport is key for everybody in every organisation but old habits die hard. Change takes very strong leadership. Conflicts of interest in sport is an iceberg. You can see the tip of it but so much is under the water and hard to get people to deal with. People don’t understand what their roles and their legal duties are, and they don’t understand that the processes are for them to act in the best interest and not in their own interest.”