Hear me out!
I never was really into sports politics, but last weekend I had some time and decided to follow a bit the recent IAAF congress and I am not focusing here so much on the specific decisions made this weekend but rather the structure of the IAAF (and possibly sport federations in general to some extent). For anything I am stating here, I am trying to get a discussion started, so feel free to correct me, add things or just troll around. I am not a native speaker, so kill me fo that too.
Most important, why does every f*****g country that is part of the IAAF have the same number of votes in elections? I know this comparison is lacking probably a bit now, but let’s compare the IAAF to a country (like the US, France, Germany, even the European Union). Most of these countries have a two chamber politics system that is making new laws etc. (legislature). Normally a certain region/state can send a representative number of delegates to one of the chambers (House of Representatives in the US) and the other chamber is composed of the same number of delegates for each state/region (Senate). Together they make laws etc. (let’s also leave out presidents and such for now). This is used to ensure that the people’s opinion are represented proportionally, while at the same time ensuring that state / region interests are met too in a federalistic way. There are countries who leave away the senate part of this and focus only on the proportional chamber and this seems too work too. However, I do not know ANY COUNTRY THAT ONLY HAS A SENATE??!! And this is basically how the IAAF is run. Why is that now a problem? It leads to a vast overrepresentation of the interests of countries like Mali, Latvia, Colombia etc. that basically send one athlete to the Olympics. So you really wonder why delegates from certain countries can so easily be bribed? Because they do not care much about the sport, it is not important to them. Their interest are different.
However, if you want to host a World Championships or Olympics the vote of Mali, etc. counts as much as the one from the US, China or Russia. Same story with other things they vote on, e.g. how to deal with doping bans, bribery and so on.
How to solve this now? Well, first a good option would be to adopt a system in which federations have a kind of scalable number of votes depending on the number of members of their federation. Like this countries with most athletes at international competitions actually have the biggest say. You do not need to scale this exactly proportional, but if already in this voting process the US would have 10 votes, and other countries would also have more than 1 this leads to a significant change. Additionally this would actually serve as an incentive for countries with only 1 vote to promote the sport in their country, because the more athletes they et, the more power they will receive in sports politics.