Three wise men from the East have descended on London in recent days bearing the gift of the gab.

Just short of one month from now, one of them could be installed as the most important single figure in world sport –- the ninth president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

The trio - Ukraine's Sergey Bubka, Singapore's Ser Miang Ng and Tawian's Dr C K Wu - represent half the record field in the six-strong race and all three have chosen London as the sounding base for their prospects.

We have yet to hear first hand from the other three, Germany's Thomas Bach, Puerto Rico's Richard Carrion and Switzerland's Denis Oswald and the word is we won't. So it is probably unfair to make a finite judgement except in the measurement of our waistlines following such lavish hospitality from Messrs Bubka, Ng and Wu.

Maybe it was the sight of octogenarian International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) President Lamine Diack with his arm around Seb Coe's shoulders at the London Anniversary Games which initially prompted Bubka to host the British media to a slap-up lunch at the swank London eaterie Quaglinos.

The Ukrainian, who consistently raised the bar in his illustrious pole vaulting days as an Eastern Bloc icon under the Soviet banner, now seeks to raise his political profile in a bid to become the next IOC President.


Failing this, he will challenge Coe for the top job in world athletics now that Diack has finally indicated he will step down in 2015.

Actually, in many ways this charismatic Olympic legend would make a cracking IOC President.

He's especially hot on doping and shares with Ng and Wu - as well as Coe - the desire to implement a four year ban on druggies and those in their entourage who supply them. As well as downsizing the Games.

But, at a mere 49, Bubka, who heads a large bakery empire in his homeland, among other things, may be deemed a tad too young to run what is essentially an old boys' club. Maybe his time will come.

Ser Miang Ng may not be a name which trips easily off the tongue but it is one with which I suspect we may become distinctly familiar in the coming years. Bach, as the longest-serving vice-president, is the recognised favourite to succeed Jacques Rogge but as one sage Olympic watcher observed, he could be uncomfortably in the 2005 Paris position - too premature a shoo-in who could fall at the final hurdle.

I sense a groundswells of support for Ng, not least because seven of those eight Presidents have been European - including the last four in the 41 years since American Avery Brundage - and many members clearly feel it is time for a new Continent to get a look in.

The dapper Ng, 64. is emerging as the most likely of the six candidates to provide it when the vote is taken in Buenos Aires on September 10.


Like Bubka, he came to London and presented impeccable credentials when launching his media campaign over lunch at Forman's Fish Island in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium

A quietly-spoken multi-faceted businessman - he heads the tiny Republic's largest supermarket chain - he is a former politician and diplomat and yachtsman.

His manifesto would see making the IOC more of a democracy, giving the members more say, his first move taking them on a pilgrimage to Olympia to remind them of Olympism's core values.

Significantly, he has been been instrumental in transforming Singapore, where as I know from my own time there working in The Straits Times in the Eighties, sport was virtually a dirty word and education everything under hard line Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yu, into the vibrant sporting hub of South East Asia.

Now Singapore sport swings where once it was stifled. It is the home of the superbly-organised night Formula One Grand Prix and next year wll open a state-of-the arts sports complex ideally suited to host a future Commonwealth Games.

Much of this remarkable change of philosophy is down to Ng who imnitiated the nation's new Sports Policy. He orchestrated the 2005 IOC Session, when London won its 2012 bid, and was the architect of the subsequent inaugural Summer Youth Olympics in 2010.

And so to Wu. This week saw the turn of our pugnacious Taiwanese sparmate, the 66-year-old would-be world boxing czar who heads International Boxing Association (AIBA) to entertain us to a sumptuous afternoon tea in the appropriately named Queenberry Room at London's newly-refurbished Café Royal, ancestral home of boxing's famed National Sporting Club. We went suitably gloved up for that one. Actually, he came out of it rather well.

"He's a consumate politician," murmured my colleague Colin Hart, doyen boxing scribe of The Sun as the immaculately-attired construction billionaire set out his Presidential stall.

They all are, of course. Indeed, there is much real politicians could learn from those who practise the same dark art in sport.


Timing for one thing. Wu shrewdly performed a dramatic U-turn disguised as a stroke of humanitarianism when, between our sips of Earl Grey and munching of cucumber sandwiches and strawberry tarts, he declared that he had personally rescinded the decision which banned English boxers from competing internationally.

He even apologised to those schoolboy and youth boxers who had been deprived of the opportunity of a lifetime, taking part in recent European Championships, while still laying the blame at the door of the Amateur Boxing Association of England for the ongoing dispute with the International Boxing Association (AIBA). "It is something I very much regret," he told me.

As insidthegames has reported, Wu decreed that the ban is now lifted even if the situation remains unresolved before next month's World Junior Championships in Kyiv and October's senior Championships in Kazakhstan. .

He seemed to have absorbed the lesson that one man he cannot afford to upset is his "very good friend" Lord Coe, who is not only the British Olympic Association (BOA) chairman but but an ardent boxing aficionado and someone, as Wu says,"might make a very good IOC President himself one day."

Then well-connected Coe also happens to have the ear of some influential IOC members.

The BOA had been less than enamoured with the written response from AIBA to their request that the banned English schoolkids due to box in their Euro Championships might do so under an AIBA flag. In no uncertain terms they were brusquely told to mind their own business.

Wu told us before his media conference that the unfortunate wording of the letter was not authorised or signed by him and he regretted it had caused offence. It was certainly not what the doctor ordered.

So someone might be in for a rollicking.

Wu had entered the London ring on the backfoot, aware of his unpopularity over the ban while maintaining that the suspension of ABAE was justified, as, not for the first time, they had infringed AIBA regulations.

However we pointed out just how ludicrously unfair it was was that, for example, Nicola Adams, lauded by AIBA as the world's first female Olympic boxing gold medallist just a year ago, and now a national treasure, should be barred, along with every other English boxer from schools level upwards, by the same organisation which claims a prime objective is to protect and further the interests of boxers.


Wasn't making them collatoral damage to a spat between blazers contrary to the spirit of sport-and Olympism? Thankfully Wu has got the message. Good for him,

Irrespective of the outcome of the dispute there will be on no further ban on the boxers."No matter what the Disciplinary Commission is, I will allow the boxers to go, he says. It is my personal decision." That's how autocracy works.

His was a purposeful charm offensive but did Wu woo the sceptics? We agreed afterwards that he had talked an extremely good fight, which you would expect from, a boxing man. And some of his ideas for reforming the IOC, not least in in restoring inspection visits of bidding cities by members, inside his proposed one-off eight-year term were eminently sensible. "I always deliver," he vowed.

If elected, the IOC would certainly know it had a forceful President. But the nagging thought persists that it might become even more of an autocracy than it was under "Slavery Avery".

What was then amateur boxing clearly needed something of a dictatorship when he came in and cleaned up the corrupt mess left by the previous regime. He says he even had threats on his life, but when he took over seven years ago his message to AIBA's members was unequivocal."You have to follow me. I am the boss now."

Actually I do quite like Wu. Basically boxing's bossman is an honourable bloke with much to offer in necessary reform of the IOC. But he may have seriously harmed his chances by relentlessly pursuing his impossible dream of governing world fisticuffs in all its forms and allowing fully-fledged pros - albeit those having had less than 20 pro fights - into the Games.

This could be downright dangerous, risking gross mismatches - or worse.

It is like taking the sport back to the bad old days of the boxing booths and could cost him the Presidency.

As yet the case for the three other candidates remains publicly unheard, so the jury is still out.

But if I were an IOC member I think I could be persuaded at this stage to rock the boat and give my vote to Ser Miang Ng, the Singapore sailor. I like the cut of his jib.

If he can effect such a sea change in once sport-apathetic Singapore, think of what he might do should he rule the waves at the IOC.

Alan Hubbard is a sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday, and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Games, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.