Nobody knows the ins and outs of the Olympics like Bob Barney.
Blessed with a backstory and lived experience that makes Forrest Gump’s impossible life feel all the more possible, the founding director of Western’s International Centre for Olympic Studies (ICOS) attended 11 Games all over the world, starting with the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal.
Barney, who turned 94 in January, is a walking-talking history of the Olympics (and Western’s own storied history at the Games). He doesn’t make the epic treks overseas and across continents anymore (calling it a ‘young person’s game’ given the extensive travel), so he won’t be visiting Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo for the 2026 Games – but he’ll be glued to his TV catching as much of the Olympic action as he can.
Olympic expert and Western professor emeritus Bob Barney. (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications)
“I look forward to the Games every time. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen the rituals – the lighting of the flame, the victory ceremonies, the parade of nations – things I’ve written about. These ritual elements of the Olympics all matter,” said Barney, professor emeritus at Western’s School of Kinesiology in the Faculty of Health Sciences.
Nothing tops hunkering down and watching a country’s very best compete against another’s, Barney said. It’s David versus Goliath. Better yet, it’s Goliath versus Goliath.
“I love these duels in the sun and snow between two antagonists of any particular sport – like Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis in 1988 in the 1000-metre final. These matchups between the best of the best are like an old-fashioned gunfight at high noon,” he said.
A prolific writer and scholar who has studied the Olympics for more than five decades, Barney was honoured with the Olympic Order in 1997. Established in 1975 by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), it’s the highest award of the Olympic Movement, awarded to Barney for his work in founding ICOS in 1989. He was also recognized for creating Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, the first peer-reviewed academic journal focused solely on the Olympic Movement.
Barney also received the Pierre de Coubertin Medal in 2009 for his research and creation of intellectual works contributing to the promotion of Olympism and his lifetime achievements in advancing Olympic scholarship.
Olympic identity
The author of hundreds of scholarly articles and several books, Barney’s most recent, titled A Games Changer: The International Olympic Committee, Tokyo 2020, and COVID-19 (co-authored with Stephen Wenn), was published last year.
He’s so connected within the Olympic movement that Barney and Wenn were granted a two-hour interview with outgoing IOC president Thomas Bach at headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland when researching A Games Changer.
“I try to stay cognizant of key issues discussed at the higher levels of IOC administration,” said Barney. “Last time I was in Lausanne, we met with people trying to get gambling and esports into the Olympic ecosystem.”
He’s studied the Olympics, and the leadership of the IOC, through many chapters of evolution and pushes for change. But Barney knows just how carefully the governing body wields its power in global athletics.
“The values – youth, health, peace, tolerance, understanding, fair play – have been there from the start, though in recent decades the IOC has really heightened that identity. It has to be protected,” said Barney. “If the IOC gets politically entangled – human rights, geopolitics, environmental issues – it risks damaging the brand.”
Western links to the Olympics
While he can’t imagine his life now without the Games, Barney says his Olympic journey very much chose him. Studying the five rings was never planned – it wasn’t on the radar for anyone until a lone researcher from Penn State, who later became a close friend of Barney’s, sparked the flame for now hundreds, if not thousands, of scholars worldwide.
What started as the study of physical education soon gave rise to a new subject.
Bob Barney is the founding director of Western University’s International Centre for Olympic Studies. (Christopher Kindratsky/Western Communications)
“Until the late 1960s, physical education was divided between bioscience and the social-cultural side – history, sociology, philosophy. In the 1960s and early 1970s, sport history exploded,” said Barney. “But for years, only one person, John Lucas from Penn State, was studying the Olympics. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that interest finally started to grow.”
In 1984, Barney was asked to teach a summer course on the Olympics.
“It was then I realized that the Olympics, nearly a hundred years old at the time, had really never been studied significantly. That led to the idea of a Centre for Olympic Studies at Western. Undergraduate courses, graduate research, a journal, conferences.”
Barney isn’t the only Western connection to the Olympics. Dr. Jane Thornton, a Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry professor, took over as director of the IOC’s Health, Medicine, and Science portfolio in 2024.
“Western University has had an immense relationship with the Olympics – athletes, coaches, medical personnel, scholars, administrators. Jane Thornton went from an office right down the hallway from me (in Thames Hall) to running the IOC’s Health, Medical and Science Department. Hundreds applied for that job. And she survived every cut,” said Barney
“That Western-Olympic legacy really began with John Howard Crocker (1870-1959) in the 1930s and 40s. Western’s Olympic connection is something you could easily spend a lifetime documenting.”
Crocker served as director of physical education and athletics at Western from 1930 to 1947, a role Barney later partially fulfilled as director of athletics from 1972 to 1979. Crocker led the first Canadian Olympic team at the 1908 Games in London, England as manager, continuing as an honorary manager until 1956. He later played a pivotal role in shaping sports at Western.
An Olympic ‘fan’ and scholar
Barney is still passionate about the Olympic Games. And it doesn’t matter which sport.
In fact, that’s something else Barney loves about the Olympics. A diehard fan of his beloved Boston Red Sox, Barney doesn’t want to watch more baseball at the Games. Instead, he’s zeroed in on sports he knows next to nothing about, naming skateboarding and moguls as some more recent examples.
“I’m just a fan. And I’ve become a bigger fan in later years of both the Winter and Summer Olympics,” Barney said.
The Summer Games have more sports, more athletes, more hoopla, more celebration, higher ritual, but the Winter Games, especially since the IOC staggered them to be celebrated in the even-numbered years between the Summer Games, are gaining momentum.
“They have really taken on a life of their own,” said Barney, noting the idea for alternating Summer and Winter Games every two years since 1994 actually came from an ABC television executive, not someone inside the IOC administration.
The commercial side of the Games
In 2002, Barney co-authored the international award-winning book Selling the Five Rings: The IOC and the Rise of the Olympic Commercialism, with former Western graduate students. It dives deep into the history of corporate sponsorships and television rights for the Olympic Games.
“In the early days, profits were in the hundreds, then thousands. By the 1990s, millions. Now billions. What’s around the corner? Trillions? Sport is entertainment, and the industry is enormous, be it professional, amateur or collegiate. The money flowing through it is staggering and the Olympics are the peak,” said Barney.
Still, the Olympics are far more than transactional.
Barney says once you’re involved with the Olympics, it stays with you.
“The Olympic Movement itself is extraordinary,” said Barney. “What started as a lonely pursuit exploded internationally. And it completely took over my life. It still excites me to this very day.”
