Kirsty Coventry reacts after she was introduced as the brand new IOC President on the Worldwide Olympic Committee 144th session in Costa Navarino, western Greece, Thursday, March 20, 2025.
Thanassis Stavrakis/AP
cover caption
toggle caption
Thanassis Stavrakis/AP
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa—Zimbabwean Olympic swimmer Kirsty Coventry has had an eventful profession, from the pool, to parliament.
The nation’s former dictator, Robert Mugabe, referred to as her “a golden girl,” whereas the person who deposed him in a coup — Emmerson “the Crocodile” Mnangagwa – appointed her his minister of sports activities.
Now the 41-year-old is taking up a complete new function, after being voted in on Thursday as the primary feminine — and first African — president of the Worldwide Olympic Committee [IOC]. She’s additionally the youngest.
“The young girl who first started swimming in Zimbabwe all those years ago could never have dreamt of this moment,” she mentioned after successful a majority 49 of 97 votes, and beating six males to the submit. “Glass ceilings have been shattered today.”
Coventry was born in a newly-independent Zimbabwe in 1983, simply years after a liberation battle that noticed the top of white-minority rule in what had as soon as been Rhodesia.
She was a swimming star from an early age, competing in her first Olympics in 2000 when she was nonetheless at highschool. However it was within the 2004 and 2008 Video games the place she actually excelled, successful the Gold each occasions within the 200-meter backstroke.
Zimbabwe’s Kirsty Coventry celebrates successful the gold within the ladies’s 200-meter backstroke closing through the swimming competitions within the Nationwide Aquatics Heart on the Beijing 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Saturday, Aug. 16, 2008.
Mark J. Terrill/AP
cover caption
toggle caption
Mark J. Terrill/AP
She was fashionable with Zimbabweans of all races for successful the nation a complete of seven medals earlier than she retired in 2016.
Nevertheless she has confronted some criticism for collaborating in Mnangagwa’s authorities, which has been accused of rights abuses and which held a disputed election in 2023.
There has additionally been controversy round Coventry’s stance on transgender athletes. She has mentioned transgender ladies have an unfair benefit and has backed a blanket ban on them competing in ladies’s Olympic sports activities.
Which may easy her relations with the president of the subsequent nation set to carry a summer time Olympics: the US. Los Angeles will host the 2028 Video games, and President Donald Trump has been a vocal opponent of transgender ladies in sport.
However there are worries for the subsequent Olympics at a time of accelerating international polarization.
Requested by journalists Thursday if she was involved about coping with Trump, if for instance he tried to ban athletes from sure international locations, the Zimbabwean was blasé.
“I have been dealing with, let’s say, difficult men in high positions since I was 20 years old,” she quipped.
