The Vote That Cost Bowling the Olympics
Francois Lavoie is a Professional Bowlers Association champion — he won the PBA U.S. Open in 2016, throwing a perfect game in the semifinals on his way to the title. He is also, on paper, the closest professional bowling has ever come to an Olympic athlete. In 2023, Lavoie sat on a working group of seven national federations trying to drag the sport’s world governing body into the daylight. They lost, eighty-seven to seventeen. That vote is the single clearest reason you have never seen a bowler walk into an Olympic stadium, and the reason you may never.
What the IBF Actually Controls
The governing body is the International Bowling Federation. It runs the amateur, country-versus-country side of the sport — the side that would feed an Olympic event if one ever existed. It is recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and for most of its life it was headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland, the same small city that houses the IOC itself. That recognition is the whole prize. The PBA Tour can crown tenpin champions in Las Vegas all it wants, but the only road that ends in an Olympic medal runs through the International Bowling Federation. In October 2023, that body held an election in Kuwait — and what happened in that room decided more than who held a title.
Cathy Innes and the Seven Federations
The man who won that election is Sheikh Talal Mohammad Al-Sabah, a senior member of Kuwait’s ruling family who has been president of the International Bowling Federation, on and off, for years. The eighty-seven to seventeen vote handed him a third four-year term. His challenger was Cathy Innes of Canada, executive director of the Canadian Tenpin Federation and a vice president of the sport’s Pan American zone — not a protester from the outside but a federation official who had run the numbers and decided the risk was worth it. Innes did not run as a personality. She ran as the face of a reform package that seven federations — Canada, the United States, England, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Costa Rica — had spent months writing, with the United States Bowling Congress, the largest national bowling body in the world, providing the legal architecture and a governance attorney, Scott Beightol, drafting the language.
No Financial Report Since 2019
What they were asking for sounds almost boring until you understand why they had to ask. The reform package amended the federation’s Articles of Association, circulated in full on August 17, 2023, ahead of the Kuwait congress. They wanted term limits for officers. They wanted the executive board, not a single president, to elect the president. They wanted independent finance and audit committees, and financial statements published and independently reviewed, with board members automatically removed if they refused to comply. That last demand had a documented reason: the joint statement the working group filed alongside the package said member federations had not seen a financial report from the International Bowling Federation since 2019 — four years of silence on the federation’s own money, from the governing body that member nations pay dues to and entrust with their Olympic fate.
The Proxy Machine, Decided in Advance
Above all, they wanted to eliminate proxy voting at the general meeting — and that is the center of the entire story. At an International Bowling Federation general meeting, any delegation could carry an unlimited number of proxy votes, whether it represented a hundred thousand members or a single affiliated club. There was no cap. One person in the room could hold the votes of a dozen federations who never showed up. The seven reformers walked in believing they had broad support; they walked into a system where the people running the meeting already held a controlling stack of proxies before a single word was spoken. The reformers had to use the rigged system to try to un-rig it.
87-17: The Ballot Breakdown
The Asian Bowling Federation’s own record of the October 6, 2023 congress notes the detail that explains every number that followed — not a reformer’s account, not a journalist’s summary, but the federation’s own minutes. Forty-three members attended carrying proxies, with no cap on how many a single delegation could hold, and the presidium had aggregated those proxies before a single delegation was called to order. The room was decided before the room sat down. The presidential race went to the incumbent, eighty-seven to seventeen; the vice-presidential seats went the same direction by nearly identical margins. Then the package of amendments — the term limits, the audits, the published finances — was voted down on its own separate ballot, seventy-two to thirty-three. You can re-elect the incumbent and still say you considered reform, because reform had its own ballot and its own result. The mechanism gave the presidium both.
The Reported $10 Million and the Referral
The reformers had a reason to demand the books. According to reporting by the Olympic news outlet Inside the Games, more than ten million dollars was transferred in 2021 out of the accounts of the International Bowling Federation and the Asian Bowling Federation into a personal account controlled by Sheikh Talal. That is the allegation Inside the Games published. According to reporting by Inside the Games and SportBusiness, the matter was referred to European authorities, including Europol and Swiss police, following the reported transfer. That referral did not end with a public prosecution, and Sheikh Talal was reported cleared through the federation’s own process; his lawyers stated he had not taken any money from the federation, and he denies wrongdoing. There was no independent investigation before he resumed the presidency. But a referral to Europol and Swiss police is not an internal-politics allegation from a rival faction — it is a matter that European law enforcement were asked to examine.
Lausanne Goes Dark, LA28 Slams Shut
What is not in dispute is the fallout. The International Bowling Federation could not pay its bills, walked away from its Lausanne headquarters, left staff unpaid from November onward, and was reportedly down to a single remaining employee. And Inside the Games reported that the financial scandal almost certainly cost bowling its chance even to bid for the 2028 Los Angeles Games — the one realistic Olympic window in a generation, in the sport’s biggest market. The proxy machine didn’t just elect a man. It protected a balance sheet, and in doing so it shut an Olympic door that had been inching open since bowling appeared as a demonstration sport at Seoul in 1988.
Run Like Every Other Federation
Strip away the specifics and the ask was modest: run the International Bowling Federation the way every other Olympic-recognized federation is expected to run — term limits, an independent audit, published books, and one vote per federation instead of an uncapped stack of proxies gathered before the meeting sits down. Seven of the sport’s most credible national bodies put their institutional weight behind that, hired a governance lawyer, and lost anyway, because the rules of the room were written to make losing the only possible outcome. That is the scandal that ended bowling’s Olympic dream: not a doping case, not a fixed match, but a governing body that voted, by its own rules, to keep the lights off — and took the sport’s Olympic future down with it.
Chapters
- 0:00 The Vote That Cost Bowling the Olympics
- 1:25 What the IBF Actually Controls
- 2:40 Cathy Innes and the Seven Federations
- 4:05 No Financial Report Since 2019
- 5:25 The Proxy Machine, Decided in Advance
- 7:00 87-17: The Ballot Breakdown
- 8:20 The Reported $10 Million and the Referral
- 9:55 Step Down, Then Walk Right Back In
- 11:05 Lausanne Goes Dark, LA28 Slams Shut
- 12:25 Run Like Every Other Federation
Sources
- Inside the Games – IBF governance, the reported 2021 transfer, Europol/Swiss-police referral, LA28
- Asian Bowling Federation – congress record (Oct 6, 2023; proxy count and tallies)
- International Bowling Federation – official site (officers, congresses, Articles)
- United States Bowling Congress / BOWL.com – USBC role in the reform working group
- bowlinglife.eu – “Is This Democracy?” interview (Helena Sundqvist)