FIS presidency To Be Contested. GB Nominates Its Own CEO

The races are still running, the Finals are still to come, and the season will not be over until the last gate falls in Hafjell. But behind the scenes of this extraordinary World Cup campaign, a very different competition is quietly gathering pace — one conducted not in ski boots but in meeting rooms, written in letters to national ski federations, and decided by the 135 member associations of the International Ski and Snowboard Federation. The election for the presidency of FIS — the most powerful administrative post in the world's most commercially ambitious winter sport — is approaching, and the politics surrounding it are, if anything, more volatile than they were when Johan Eliasch first walked into the job five years ago.

With that mandate complete, the 54th FIS Congress, expected in late spring or early summer of 2026, will determine who leads the federation for the next four years. Whether Eliasch leads it himself is the question that everyone in the sport is, in varying degrees of urgency, trying to answer.

One thing is now known, there will be an election. The board of directors of GB Snowsport met on Tuesday 3 March and agreed the nomination of Victoria Gosling OBE as the GB candidate for the forthcoming FIS Presidential elections.

Curiously GBS nominated Eliasch for the presidency when he was elected as the FIS President on 4th June 2021, becoming just the fifth person in the history of FIS in the role.

The board was impressed by Ms Gosling’s vision for the future of FIS, the role of the Presidency, and the opportunities to continue the growth of world class skiing and snowboarding as a major global sport.

Victoria Gosling OBE said: “I am very grateful to the board of GB Snowsport for their support and confidence in nominating me as a candidate for the FIS Presidential elections. It would be a privilege to play a greater role in shaping the strategic direction of our sport alongside all other FIS nations and supporting the growth of skiing and snowboarding worldwide that we all wish to see. I am also grateful to the board and to my colleagues within GB Snowsport for their continuing work in ensuring the progress of our athletes and our programme. I will continue to take a hands-on role in delivering GB Snowsport’s work, while also looking to share the ambition and successes we have brought to British skiing and snowboarding as part of a vision for the next phase of FIS’ future.”

Jason Cobbold, GB Snowsport Chairman, said: “The board was impressed by Vicky’s vision for the future of FIS and the role the Presidency can play in strengthening and growing our sport globally. Vicky’s track record is well known and admired, and the board felt confidence that the leadership style and direction she demonstrated through the nomination process would make her a very strong candidate for our sport on the international stage.”

Since taking charge of FIS in June 2021, Eliasch has led the organisation through a period of transformation. He introduced initiatives including the Impact Programme focused on sustainability, and established the Athletes' Health Unit to address athletes' physical and mental well-being. He pushed to centralise marketing rights, modernise television production, and — borrowing liberally from the Formula 1 playbook — argued that skiing needed a "Drive to Survive"-style broadcast product to grow its audience beyond the European heartland. He brought the World Cup back to North America in meaningful late-season windows. He created the Zermatt-Cervinia cross-border downhill. He added new Olympic disciplines. By any measure of output, the reform agenda has been real.

He also ran for the presidency of the International Olympic Committee in March 2025, setting out an ambitious vision for the movement before losing to Zimbabwe's Kirsty Coventry. He described the campaign as highly valuable regardless of outcome, saying it had given winter sport a stronger voice in the Olympic movement. Under IOC rules, his membership of that body is tied directly to his role as FIS President — he will cease to be an IOC Member upon ceasing to hold the FIS presidency. The incentive to remain in post, therefore, extends beyond skiing alone.

Whether Eliasch will seek a third term has not yet been formally confirmed. But nothing in his conduct or recent statements suggests he intends to walk away.

If Eliasch is the story of what FIS has done in five years, the opposition is the story of what FIS has not done — and whether that record is, ultimately, sufficient to displace an incumbent who has proven extraordinarily difficult to remove.

The sport's leading nations made clear their discontent with Eliasch as far back as his second election, walking out before the vote began and claiming the process was undemocratic. Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Croatia led a group of 15 national associations who demanded the option of voting yes, no, or abstaining — a request that was denied. Croatia's Vedran Pavlek was the first to leave the room, followed by delegates from Swiss Ski and the German Ski Association.

At the heart of their discontent was Eliasch's plan to centralise the marketing rights for FIS World Cup events, stripping member associations of rights they had exercised for decades. The World Cup organiser nations — Austria with Kitzbühel, Germany with Garmisch, Switzerland with Wengen and Adelboden — are not simply annoyed by this plan. They regard it as an existential threat to the economic model that funds their sport.

Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Croatia subsequently filed a formal appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, challenging the legitimacy of the re-election process. The appeal was ultimately withdrawn — not because the protesting nations had changed their view of the law, but because they recognised the procedure was interfering with the normal functioning of the federation. The legal avenue closed. The political grievance has never gone away.

The structural challenge for anyone seeking to unseat Eliasch is the same one that proved decisive in 2022: finding a credible candidate willing to stand, capable of building a majority across 135 national associations with wildly disparate interests, and able to sustain a campaign against an incumbent with the financial resources, political infrastructure, and four-year headstart of a sitting president.

The dynamic within FIS illustrates a well-established pattern in Olympic sports politics: a small number of dominant nations that drive the sport's performance and commercial activity can be outvoted by broad support from the wider membership. Eliasch — who secured his initial election and re-election partly on the strength of support from smaller federations who appreciated his rhetoric about "welfare for all associations, not just the privileged few" — understands this arithmetic better than most.

The names most frequently discussed in European skiing circles as potential challengers share a familiar cast. Urs Lehmann, the former men's downhill world champion who has served as Swiss Ski's president since 2008 and ran against Eliasch in 2021, remains a credible figure with deep experience of federation politics, a track record of commercial success at Swiss Ski, and the institutional backing of one of the sport's most powerful national bodies. He has never publicly declared his intentions for 2026.

The Swedish Olympic Committee's Mats Årjes, another 2021 candidate who ran on a platform of steady reform rather than radical transformation, similarly occupies the political ground that a challenger to Eliasch would need to claim.

Figures within the German and Austrian federations — which have the most to gain commercially from a change in direction on marketing rights — have made little secret of their interest in a genuinely competitive election.

What has been missing until now is a candidate willing to move first, absorb the inevitable counter-fire from Eliasch's organisation, and build a coalition large enough to win. In FIS presidential politics, being willing and being able are not the same thing. Gosling may win but other candidates are now likely to put their names forwards.

Eliasch is a member of the International Olympic Committee, a member of the British Olympic Association, a member of the Association of International Winter Olympic Federations, and President of the Marc Hodler Foundation. He previously served as a director of the Special Olympics Great Britain and as an advisory board member of the British Olympic Association.

The balance of probability, based on the pattern of the past five years, still favours Eliasch. His coalition of smaller national associations represents a numerical majority that is genuinely difficult to dislodge through conventional means. His control of the federation's administrative apparatus, communications, and agenda-setting capacity is considerable. And the opposition, for all its volume and legitimacy, has consistently failed to convert grievance into votes.

What has changed, heading into this election cycle, is the context. Eliasch's failed IOC presidential bid — however he frames it as a positive experience — raised questions about where his primary ambitions lie. His continuing role as an IOC member is conditional on retaining the FIS presidency, which means the calculation is no longer purely about skiing. And the four years of centralisation battles, legal disputes, and walkouts have generated a fatigue in the federation's relationships with its most commercially significant members that is harder to dismiss as simply "resistance to change."

A competitive election — one with a credible challenger, a real campaign, and a genuine choice on the ballot — would be the most significant development in FIS governance since 2021. Whether the dissatisfied nations can produce one remains, as the season approaches its final act, the unanswered question at the heart of the sport.

What can be said with confidence is this: the next FIS president will inherit a federation in the middle of the most commercially ambitious restructuring in its history, with the world's leading nations still unreconciled to the direction of travel, and a World Cup circuit that has just delivered one of its most spectacular seasons in living memory. Whoever sits in that chair will need, above all, the ability to hold all of that together.

Whether that person is Johan Eliasch, or someone he has yet to be formally challenged by, the sport will find out before the summer is out.