BUENOS AIRES, Sept 10: Thomas Bach achieved a long-held dream on Tuesday as he was elected to the most powerful position in sport, president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), keeping the powerful sports body in European hands.

The 59-year-old lawyer — who became only the ninth president in the body’s 119-year history and the first Olympic gold medallist to become president — won in the second round of voting by his fellow IOC members to beat his five male rivals bidding to succeed Jacques Rogge, the Belgian who is stepping down after 12 years as head of the Olympic body.

“I want to be president of all of you,” the German beamed as his fellow IOC members applauded the decision.

Bach, a firm favourite in a choice of six candidates, secured victory in the second round of voting.

He received 49 votes in the second round to secure a winning majority. Richard Carrion of Puerto Rico finished second with 29 votes.

Athletics legend Sergey Bubka was humiliated as he garnered just four votes — although he made the second round which was not the case for Taiwan’s Wu Ching-Kuo who was eliminated.

Bach, gold medallist with the West German team in the team foil event in the 1976 Olympics, had been the frontrunner throughout the campaign and had for years been seen as the man most likely to replace Rogge.

Bach received a standing ovation for nearly a full minute after Rogge opened a sealed envelope to announce his victory. Bach bowed slightly to the delegates to acknowledge the warm response and thanked the members in several different languages.

“I know what the enormous responsibilities are of being IOC president but I am very happy,” he said after the announcement, which saw him break into a broad smile. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

“You my friends and colleagues have placed in me an overwhelming sign of trust. I also have enormous respect for my fellow candidates and I will work with you. I will put into practise what my motto was during the campaign: ‘unity in diversity’.”

Bach said that being in Buenos Aires borught memories flooding back from when he was an athlete.

“I came here with the team a year after winning Olympic gold,” he said. “Then it was a cold winter but all I take from it is the warmth of the relations we enjoyed with our rivals even in a dramatic final where we came back from nowhere to win.

“So I take those same warm feelings from the win today.”

As head of Germany’s national Olympic committee, Bach ticked all the boxes. The multi-lingual and affable German was the founding president of his country’s Olympic Sports Confederation with some 28 million members.

Sitting on the boards of several companies, Bach is also the chairman of the Ghorfa Arab-German Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and his involvement with the Olympic movement stretches back to the milestone Olympic congress in Baden-Baden where he became a representative of the athletes.

As head of the IOC’s juridical commission and its disciplinary commission Bach has also been at the forefront of sanctioning drugs cheats, in line with Rogge’s “zero tolerance” policy.

After awarding the 2020 Olympics to Tokyo and bringing wrestling back into the games, the IOC completed the last of its three critical votes — choosing the person for the most powerful job in international sports.

Bach’s supporters had hoped for a first-round win, but a second-round victory still showed that he had a big base of support.

Carrion, who chairs the IOC’s finance commission and negotiates lucrative US television rights deals, wound up being Bach’s only serious challenger.The votes fell off after that with Ng Ser Miang of Singapore getting six and Denis Oswald of Switzerland five.

Much of the pre-election talk among the members has been about the power of Sheikh Ahmad Al-Fahad Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti who heads the Association of National Olympic Committees.

Sabah is a key backer of Bach. The front page of one Argentinian newspaper last week had a cartoon of Sabah, wearing a t-shirt with Bach’s face on it, grinning and with his thumb raised, while rival Oswald went public and slammed him for his business links with Kuwait.

However, it made little impact and Oswald, like his fellow candidates, were no match for the machine behind Bach.—Agencies