Who Is The New IOC President Kirsty Coventry?

Zimbabwe’s Kirsty Coventry was elected as the next President of the International Olympic Committee Thursday, becoming the first woman and first person from Africa to lead the 131-year-old Olympic movement.

It took just a single round of voting by the 97 IOC members assembled in Costa Navarino, Greece to sweep Coventry into office, a show of unity that has not marked recent IOC elections. The 41-year-old succeeds Thomas Bach as only the tenth person to lead the Olympic movement since the organization was founded in 1894.

“Greece seems to be my lucky charm,” quipped Coventry, who won the first of her seven Olympic medals in swimming at the Athens Games in 2004. Hearing her name announced as the new IOC President was akin to winning her first Olympic medal, she added.

The selection of a woman from Africa as its leader is a bold new direction for the IOC, whose nine previous presidents have all been men from Europe or the United States. That her election represents momentous change has not been lost on Coventry, who hailed it as “a really powerful signal” that the landscape of Olympic sport is evolving in a positive way.

“It’s a signal that we’re truly global, and that we have evolved into an organisation that is truly open to diversity. And we’re going to continue walking that road in the next eight years,” she said.

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The youngest candidate by a decade, Coventry is guaranteed to lead the IOC until at least 2033, with the possibility of one four-year extension. After the results were announced, she delivered a warm address to the IOC members, invoking her beginnings as a child captivated by seeing the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona on TV and promising to further unite the membership that handed her victory.

“As a nine-year-old girl I never thought I would be standing up here one day," she said. “This race was an incredible race, and it made us better, made us a stronger movement. I know from all of the conversations that I’ve had with every single one of you how much stronger our movement is going to be when we now come back together and deliver on some of those ideas that we all shared.

“This is not just a huge honor but it is a reminder of my commitment to every single one of you that I will lead this organization with so much pride, with the values at the core, and I will make all of you very, very proud, and hopefully extremely confident in the decision that you have made today. Thank you from the bottom of my heart — and now we’ve got some work together.”

Forecast to be a drawn-out process involving several rounds of voting, the election was stunningly brief, with just a single round of voting required to give Coventry the necessary majority against the other six candidates in the race.

Coventry received 49 votes, exactly the number needed to win. Spain’s Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr., whose father was IOC President between 1980 and 2001, came second with 28, in front of World Athletics President Sebastian Coe, who was on the podium despite getting only eight. David Lappartient and Morinari Watanabe, both presidents of major international sports federations, received four votes apiece, while businessman Johan Eliasch and HRH Prince Feisal Al Hussein of Jordan each earned two.

Kirsty Coventry’s election: a historic day for women, Africa, and the Olympic movement

As IOC President, Coventry will steer the multibillion dollar organization through the delivery of the next four Summer and Winter Olympic Games as well as negotiations for new broadcast and sponsorship deals that generate the bulk of the IOC’s revenue. As the sports world’s biggest ambassador and diplomat, she will have to walk the line between promoting the Olympic values of peace and solidarity in an increasingly fractious world and making sure athletes’ rights are respected, a contradiction that has flummoxed the IOC in recent years. The effects of climate change, which threaten to overshadow upcoming editions of the Winter Games, pose additional challenges.

Coventry is said to have enjoyed Bach’s support for her bid, though the outgoing IOC President took pains to maintain a strict facade of neutrality in Thursday’s election, pointedly abstaining from voting for his successor. One of the appeals of Coventry’s platform may have been that she is the candidate most likely to follow the course Bach has set since his election 12 years ago. In that way, Coventry’s election might be seen as an expression of IOC members’ approval of Bach, whose forward-looking policies have led to a more flexible Olympic programme featuring new sports, the creation of a refugee Olympic team that is a source of support and inspiration for displaced athletes, an easier-to-digest bidding process for prospective host cities, and gender parity at the Paris Games.

With seven Olympic medals in her own right, Coventry is Africa’s most decorated Olympian. An elite swimmer who earned a Bachelor’s degree from Auburn University, Coventry achieved national treasure status by winning three medals, including gold in the 200 meter backstroke, in Athens in 2004, a mere 12 years after Barcelona put stars into her eyes. She defended her Olympic title four years later in Beijing and earned another three medals there, then swam at the London 2012 and Rio de Janeiro 2016 Games before retiring and becoming Zimbabwe’s Minister of Sport, Art, and Recreation.

The resulting fame in her native country — Coventry accounts for seven of Zimbabwe’s eight Olympic medals and its only golds — provided Coventry a window into the wider world of sports politics. Despite severe political turbulence in Zimbabwe during the Athens Olympics, the nation dropped everything to celebrate her and her accomplishments, throwing her a hero’s welcome when she arrived in Harare following the Games.

“Many of you know Zimbabwe wasn’t going through a very good time at that point,” Coventry told the media in a January Q and A. “But when I got home it was a time of three days or four days of peace, and so I really got to see the power of sport.”

No matter what else she does, Coventry has pledged to put the athlete first during her mandate, a task for which her experiences make her an ideal candidate.

“I think it speaks volumes when you can really truly understand what the athletes are going through,” she said Thursday. “They’re at the heart of our movement. President Bach ensured that they remained at the heart, and I will continue to do that.

“It really does make a big difference when you’re talking to athletes, and you can understand where they’re coming from, what their expectations are, because you lived it, you went through it.”