Zimbabwe’s sports minister Kirsty Coventry has been elected president of the International Olympic Committee, becoming the first woman to lead one of the most powerful bodies in global sport.
Many IOC observers had expected an extremely tight race that would be decided by multiple rounds of voting. Instead, Coventry secured more than 50 per cent of the 100-plus IOC members’ votes during the first round in a secret ballot held at a luxury beach resort in southern Greece on Thursday afternoon.
Coventry, a two-time swimming gold medallist, was the only woman in the contest and widely seen as a continuity candidate and the preferred choice of outgoing president Thomas Bach, who led the IOC for 12 years. Coventry joined the IOC athlete’s commission in 2012, and then the executive committee in 2023.
“This race was an incredible race and it made us better, made us a stronger movement,” Coventry said after the result was announced.
Once dubbed Zimbabwe’s “golden girl” by the late dictator Robert Mugabe, she was named sports minister by president Emmerson Mnangagwa in 2018.
Her rivals in the election included the British president of World Athletics Lord Sebastian Coe and Spanish banker Juan Antonio Samaranch, whose father of the same name ran the IOC for more than two decades.
All three had promised to decentralise decision making and hand more power back to members, reversing some of the steps taken under Bach and a handful of top executives in Lausanne.
The choice was made by an elite group that includes the Emir of Qatar, wealthy philanthropist Nita Ambani, Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh and British royal Princess Anne.
Bach, who won an Olympic gold medal for fencing, was given the title honorary president for life earlier in the day, in keeping with IOC tradition. The German lawyer, who has led the Lausanne-based body since 2013, is credited with guiding it through a series of crises including the pandemic and Russia’s state-sponsored doping scandal.
Coventry, who formally takes up the post in June, faces a daunting in-tray.
The IOC is under pressure to formulate its own policy on transgender athletes after a row over women’s boxing blew up during last summer’s Paris games. Russia’s potential return to Olympic competitions after bans for doping violations and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is likely to rise up the agenda in the coming months.
The future of the IOC business model has also been questioned throughout the presidential campaign.
Although the organisation has billions of dollars of TV and sponsorship deals in place over the coming decade, the departure of several big sponsors after Paris has raised concerns that the IOC is failing to keep up with the pace of change in media and technology.
The sporting bodies that make up the roots of the Olympic ecosystem have also faced a squeeze on funding in recent years with costs rising far quicker than the sums handed down from the IOC.