Former NBA Player to Host Esports Forum

(ATR) The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has reportedly chosen former NBA player Rick Fox to moderate its upcoming Esports Forum in Switzerland.

The event will be co-hosted with the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) on July 21 in Lausanne and will address numerous topics within the esports industry, including governance, media/broadcasting, and investment.

According to the Esports Observer, citing IOC’s Sports director Kit McConnell, Fox has been selected the moderator of the event designed as a bridge between the Olympic world and esports.

Fox has owned for the past three years a esports franchise under the name of Echo Fox and is also a founding partner of Vision Venture Partners, a private equity firm with multiple esports properties including Echo Fox and Twin Galaxies.

Fox has an Olympic history. His mother Dianne Gerace competed in track and field in the 1964 Olympics.

The esports forum, according to McConnell, will serve among other things to open a dialogue between IOC president Thomas Bach and pro esports athletes. Some of the entities that wil also be present at the event include the International Electronic Sports Federation (IESF) the Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) and esports federations from France, Germany, the UK, Switzerland, Thailand, and Singapore.

The IOC still has to decide whether to include esports in its Olympic program. In fact, that decision will be made at the Olympic committee’s September 2019 annual session.

At this point, according to McConnell, there’s a gap in the inclusion process.

"For esports to be included in the Olympic program, first of all, we would have to deal with a single, recognized federation or body that represented the whole of the esports community, the same way we deal with FIFA for football, the IAAF for athletics, and so on," McConnell says.

For now, the popularity of esports has led the Asian Electronic Sports Federation (AESF) to run an esports demonstration at the next Asian Games this August, in cooperation with the Olympic Council of Asia (OCA).

Esports will start being a medal event at the 2022 edition of the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China.

The International Esports Federation, a South Korean-based organization which claims to represent 48 countries including 21 from Asia, is currently selecting representatives to attend the Forum.

The IOC has already determined that esports can be considered a sporting activity, based on the level of intensity with which gamers train.

However, one of the most divisive issues in the relationship between the IOC and the esports community revolves around the intellectual property right. McConnell says that because of esports’ commercially driven model, the IOC has no single point of contact that encompasses that industry.

Another point of contention for the IOC is violence in video games. Bach insists that the Olympic program should not include sports that are violent or about killing, thus the gaming language which include terms such as "double kill" or "killing spree" will be addressed in the upcoming Lausanne Forum.

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Homepage photo: Flickr

Written by Javier Monne

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