Juan Antonio Samaranch Salisachs (born 1 November 1959) is a Spanish sports executive and financial analyst who currently serves as the vice president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). He has one sister, María Teresa. His father was Minister of Sports under Franco from 1967 to 1971 and president of the IOC from 1980 to 2001.
Career
Before earning his MBA, Samaranch worked as a perfume salesman for International Flavors & Fragrances for two and a half years. In 1996, he became vice president of the Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne (UIPM) and in 2001, the same year his father retired, was elected as a member of the IOC. He served on the Organizing Committees for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. He was elected vice president of the IOC in 2016, where he served on the Oswald Commission, which made decisions about Russian athletes following the Summer Olympics doping scandal. He finished his four year term as VP of IOC in 2020.
Samaranch established the Samaranch Foundation in Beijing, China in 2012 in honor of his late father.
In February 2013, the IOC voted to eliminate one sport from the Olympics. Although many experts predicted that the pentathlon would be removed due to its low popularity, and despite having a larger athlete and fan base, wrestling was removed instead due to doping cases. This rule was about to start at the 2020 Summer Olympics. Samaranch was largely regarded as a major player in the decision, in part because of his conflict of interest with the UIPM, which would be damaged with the elimination of the pentathlon.
In 2019, Samaranch received an honorary doctorate from Handong Global University in South Korea. As of 2022, Samaranch had been reelected as the IOC vice president, was on the IOC's Board of Directors, was a member of the Spanish Olympic Committee, and was chairman of the Organizing Committee for Beijing 2022. Historically, Samaranch supported the candidacy of Madrid as the host of the 2016 Summer Olympics as well as Beijing for the 2022 Winter Olympics despite experts' assertions that it would be the "most unsustainable games of all time" due to the amount of artificial snow needed. He received 28 votes at the 144th IOC Session in March 2025, with Kirsty Coventry winning the election.
Personal life
Samaranch is married to Italian socialite Cristina Bigelli and together they have four children: Juan, Alessia, Matteo, and Allegra. Samaranch speaks Spanish, Catalan, Italian, French, and English.