Boris Sakač, the Croatian engineer who spent nearly three decades keeping the Olympic Games' IT systems running, has died in his native Zagreb at 82.
Sakač began his career at IBM, rising from systems engineer to head of IBM Croatia. His international sports career started at the 1979 Mediterranean Games in Split, where he was brought in by Stane Dolanc to run the Games' computerization despite having little sports background — he ended up training local high schoolers to help journalists use the new terminals, and the results system ended up setting speed records for publishing results.
That success led to work at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, where he helped salvage the IT system after IBM's withdrawal amid the Western boycott, and then to running IT for both the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Games and the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games. From there his systems were used at every Olympics from Sarajevo 1984 through Sochi 2014 — including Calgary, Seoul, Albertville, Barcelona, Lillehammer, Atlanta, Nagano, Sydney, Salt Lake City, Athens, Turin, Beijing, Vancouver and London.
From the early 1990s he served as an IT advisor to the IOC and led the ORIS project (Olympic Results and Information Services), which connected competition results to information services so results reached TV viewers within fractions of a second. He was reportedly trusted deeply by longtime IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch. A privately funded award in his name, the €5,000 Sakač Prize, has been given to top-performing computer science students.
Source: Dražen Brajdić, "Preminuo Boris Sakač, pionir razvoja informatičkih sustava Olimpijskih igara," Večernji list, 24 September 2026. https://www.vecernji.hr/sport/preminuo-boris-sakac-pionir-ra...