SportAccord Forum 2026: karate's quiet diplomacy in Lausanne as the Olympic programme is redrawn
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SportAccord Forum 2026: karate's quiet diplomacy in Lausanne as the Olympic programme is redrawn

Every autumn the international sports movement carries its conversations to the shore of Lake Geneva, and this year the gathering changed its name without changing its purpose. From 5 to 7 October 2026, the meeting long known as the IF Forum convened at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne as the SportAccord Forum, an invitation-only event closed to the press and held with the support of the International Olympic Committee, for which the organisers announced more than 500 delegates from over 120 international federations. Among them, once again, was a delegation from the World Karate Federation: Sara Wolff, its Chief Executive Officer; Davide Benetello, who chairs the WKF Athletes' Commission; and Davor Cipek, the federation's Assistant General Secretary.

A delegation in the corridors

What the three did in Lausanne is known, for now, mainly through Cipek's own account. In a Facebook post headed "IOC, ARISF, World Games & SportAccord meeting, IF FORUM", he described the week as an opportunity "to engage with leading international sports institutions, strengthen established relationships and build new strategic connections", wrote that the delegation was "very pleased with the results achieved", and thanked WKF President Antonio Espinós "for his trust and confidence". The details of these meetings have not yet been made public; in previous years the federation has published its own accounts of its Lausanne missions in the days following the forum. Its calendar, meanwhile, now turns to the World Cadet, Junior and U21 Championships in Bielsko-Biała.

These rooms are familiar ground. In October 2024 Cipek attended the IF Forum alone and, according to the WKF, met SportAccord President Uğur Erdener, ARISF President Raffaele Chiulli and IOC Vice-President Juan Antonio Samaranch. A year later the same three officials who travelled this month represented karate at the ARISF General Assembly, met IOC President Kirsty Coventry and IOC Sports Director Pierre Ducrey at the IF Forum, and sat down with Brisbane 2032's Chief Sport Officer Kit McConnell and Director of Sports Brendan Keane, a meeting the federation presented as the continuation of its dialogue on karate's Olympic prospects.

The assemblies around the forum

Cipek's heading names more than the forum itself, and the week's calendar bears it out. On 4 October, on the eve of the opening, the International World Games Association held an extraordinary general meeting at the Olympic Museum, where close to 70 federation representatives, 34 of them with voting rights, adopted constitutional amendments creating three vice-presidencies and elected Thomas Konietzko of Paddle Worldwide to the additional seat. For karate the World Games are no abstraction: the confirmed programme for Karlsruhe 2029, from 19 to 29 July, lists kata, kumite and para karate. The International SAMBO Federation, for its part, reported taking part in Lausanne in the general assemblies of both the IWGA and ARISF, the association of IOC-recognised federations in which the WKF sits.

A programme under review

On the forum's stage the theme was "When the playbook changes: leading sport in a new reality". Addressing the opening session on 5 October, Coventry told the federations that "if we stand still, we simply become irrelevant", while insisting that "we have to be very clear about what it is we stand for". She tied that balance to Fit for the Future, the strategy adopted by the IOC Session in June, and spoke of the Olympic programme in words that concern every sport waiting at its door: "We need a programme that brings together the world's best athletes," she said, adding that it must also be one "that is sustainable for the future". According to SportsIN, she also pointed to the new evaluation methodology, more focused on disciplines and on data.

The final morning followed the same thread. The IOC's Christophe Dubi and Pierre Ducrey discussed Fit for the Future before Niccolò Campriani of LA28, Mathilde Meurisse of the French Alps 2030 Games and Brendan Keane of Brisbane 2032 presented the three Games ahead. On the margins, after a Convention already fixed for Baku in May 2027, SportAccord announced on 7 October that Cape Town would host its 2028 edition, the first on African soil.

Timing became a question of its own. Meeting in Lausanne on 6 October alongside the forum, the Council of the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations asked for a process in which federations "potentially affected by the evaluation have sufficient time" to engage with the IOC, and said it supported decisions being taken at the 147th IOC Session in Punta Cana in April 2027 rather than through "an accelerated process concluding in December 2026".

Why the corridors matter

That debate runs straight through karate's own file. In August the IOC told recognised federations that disciplines which had entered the Tokyo 2020, Paris 2024 or LA28 programmes through an organising committee's proposal could be considered for Brisbane 2032, a door that corresponds to the way karate reached Tokyo; eligibility, however, is not selection, and no decision naming karate has been published. The WKF has kept the subject at the top of its agenda: in August its Executive Committee again treated Olympic prospects as a priority, with Wolff reporting as the federation's Olympic Bid leader, ahead of a WKF Congress due in Bielsko-Biała this month.

A recognised sport outside the Olympic programme has no seat where that programme is decided, only the corridors around it, and Lausanne in October is where those corridors are busiest. It is against the IOC's decisions on Brisbane 2032 that the fruit of this year's "new strategic connections" will in time be weighed, and the federation's own account of the week is still to come.

Sources

Photo: Renhour48 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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