by Stuart WeirNew IOC President
Seb Coe’s campaign to become the International Olympic Committee president in succession to Thomas Bach, ended in bitter disappointment. The appointment was to be decided by the 97 voting members with seven candidates standing: France’s David Lappartient, Japan’s Morinari Watanabe, Prince Feisal al Hussein of Jordan, Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, Swede Johan Eliasch, Kirsty Coventry from Zimbabwe and Lord Sebastian Coe.
Kirsty Coventry, Zimbabwe’s sports minister and a former Olympic swimmer became the first female and first African president of the International Olympic Committee. It was expected that it would be a close contest, going through several rounds before a winner emerged. In the event Coventry secured a winning 49 votes in the first round with Coe getting only 8. Favorite Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, whose father had held the office, got 28 votes. At 41, Coventry will be the youngest president in the organisation’s 130-year history.
The new president said afterwards: “It’s a really powerful signal. 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”.
Coventry has won seven of Zimbabwe’s eight Olympic medals – including gold in the 200m backstroke at both the 2004 and 2008 Games. “The young girl who first started swimming in Zimbabwe all those years ago could never have dreamed of this moment,” said Coventry.
“I am particularly proud to be the first female IOC president, and also the first from Africa.
I hope that this vote will be an inspiration to many people. Glass ceilings have been shattered today, and I am fully aware of my responsibilities as a role model.”
I met Kirsty Coventry when we were both delegates at a Sport and Faith conference at the Vatican in 2016. She told me about her experience as an Olympic swimmer: “My first experience was just going; I qualified for my first Olympics in Sydney in 2000 and going there and being at the biggest meet in the world and in Australia where swimming is just such a huge culture, it was a great experience just being there. I wasn’t thinking about medals at that point. It was just being there, about going and watching and learning from the people that I admired the most. So just watching Susie O’Neil warm up and how she spoke with her coach and the routine she went through and seeing how professional it was really gave me kind of a Olympic bug. It just really inspired me to keep going.
“I qualified for my second Olympic Games in 2004 but my coach and I had never spoken about winning a medal, or getting onto the podium. We just spoke about having fun and racing hard and enjoying every minute. And then I won my first Olympic medal, a silver medal from Lane 8. In my last race, I was able to win the gold medal and it was just so exciting standing on the podium and getting to hear my national anthem and then going home and being greeted by thousands and thousands of people. At that time we were going through a really hard economic political time, racial divides, people being murdered and all of a sudden for three or four days, everyone came together. Black, white. It didn’t matter where you’d come from. And it was truly amazing just to see the power of sport and to see the joy the pride people had not just in what I had done, but in Zimbabwe again, and that was really, really special”.
She retired after Rio Olympics and set up the Kirsty Coventry Trust working in schools helping the teachers who are our coaches and we actually coached them how to become coaches. They ended up being able to teach close to 400 kids how to swim and how to save themselves if they fall in the pool.
She told me that Vatican conference was so inspiring, seeing that there was so much common ground, and now she was committed to try to figure out the best way and how to move forward with that common ground to influence and better people’s lives and give back and strengthen communities”.
She explained further: “Sport has played such a huge part in my life, it’s changed my life. Through my sport I got educated at a university, I’ve travelled the world, it’s brought joy and hope to my own community back home”.
While many in track and field will be disappointed that the head of World Athletics was not successful in his bid to become head of the IOC, there is a sense that a first woman, a first African and a 41 year-old replacing a European man in his seventies shows a real commitment to diversity and equality.
