Who is Kirsty Coventry, the next president of the International Olympic Committee?
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — The next president of the International Olympic Committee is a former Zimbabwe swimmer who is Africa’s most decorated Olympian and a minister in a government often accused of oppressing political opposition.
Kirsty Coventry, 41, was elected to one of the most powerful jobs in sports on Thursday, becoming the first woman and first African to lead the Olympic movement.
She will begin her eight-year term in charge of the IOC in June.
Coventry was the back-to-back Olympic champion in the 200 meters backstroke in 2004 and 2008. She retired from swimming after the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 with seven Olympic medals, more than anyone else from Africa.
By then she was already an IOC member, getting her place in 2013 almost one year after an initial result of an athlete election at the London Olympics was overturned in part because she filed a complaint against an opponent.
Coventry is also currently Zimbabwe’s minister of youth, sports, arts and recreation, drawing some scrutiny of her affiliation with a government that has long faced accusations of cracking down on democratic freedoms and suppressing criticism in the southern African country.
Her country and the government she serves in has been targeted with sanctions by the United States and the European Union.
At the height of her swimming career, Coventry was praised and rewarded with a diplomatic passport and $100,000 by late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, an autocratic leader who ruled his country for 37 years until he was removed in a military-backed coup in 2017.
Mugabe called her Zimbabwe’s “Golden Girl,” and she was widely praised across racial lines as a source of pride in her country at a time when it was reeling from Mugabe’s policy of violently seizing farmland from white people.
Coventry became the minister of sports a year after the coup that removed Mugabe in the new administration of current President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe’s vice president who rights groups say has continued many of Mugabe’s oppressive policies.
Coventry was just 34 when she was appointed a government minister in a move that was greeted with surprise because she was young and had little political experience, but also because she is white. She was reappointed sports minister after disputed elections in 2023.
She said in a victory news conference Thursday that she will likely resign as Zimbabwe’s sports minister and move full-time to the IOC’s home city Lausanne, Switzerland.
Coventry attended an all-girls convent school in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. She went to college at Auburn University in Alabama and became one of its star swimmers. She made her Olympic debut in Sydney in 2000 while still in high school. She won three medals in the 2004 Athens Olympics and four medals at the 2008 Beijing Games.
From 2018 to 2021, Coventry was the athlete representative on the IOC executive board under Thomas Bach, the man she was elected to succeed. Coventry left some athlete groups frustrated that she followed the IOC and Bach policy line too closely.
Coventry’s effectiveness as a sports leader in her home country has been questioned by some. Zimbabwe has been banned from hosting international soccer games by the African confederation since 2020 because it doesn’t have a stadium that meets the required standard.
During Coventry’s first news conference as the next IOC president, the Zimbabwe men’s team was playing a “home” game in a 2026 World Cup qualifying group in Durban in neighboring South Africa because of its stadium problems.
Zimbabwe was also temporarily suspended from international soccer by world body FIFA in 2022 because of government interference. Zimbabwe was allowed back into international soccer in 2023.
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By GERALD IMRAY
Associated Press
