What if you wanted to build a new Olympic movement, but without the International Olympic Committee? We’re not talking about just staging a series of nation-based competitions, but building an entire global governance infrastructure for international sports. If you wanted to create a competitor for the Olympic Games, what would that look like? How would you do it from a commercial and legal perspective?

You would probably start with a small but rapidly growing sport to test out the business case and then build up from there.

As a first step in establishing the legal infrastructure, you would replace the parliamentary-style governance system of the IOC with a private company, so you could act quickly and decisively. That private company would not just stage the competitions, it would, like the IOC, own the trademarks for the games and use them to license legitimacy. It would determine which games are played, which athletes are eligible to compete, and who is awarded the title “world champion.” It would set and enforce the rules that govern the new competition system.

You would also need to recreate the local infrastructure that the IOC uses to select and train national teams. You would need organizations in each country to manage that country’s........

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