Kirsty Coventry has simply shattered the glass ceiling to develop into the primary girl and African to be named the pinnacle of the Worldwide Olympic Committee in its 130-year historical past.
The Zimbabwean swimming champ got here out on prime to interchange the controversial Thomas Bach, taking the highest job in world sport. ‘It’s a sign that we’re actually world and that we’ve got developed into an organisation that’s actually open to range, and we’re going to proceed,’ she stated at her acceptance speech on Thursday, March 20, in Athens.
Coventry clinched the place, leaving candidate Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr in second place, adopted by Sebastian Coe in third. She stated that she would spend the following few months working with Thomas Bach to make sure a clean handover of duties and to change some key concepts.
Kirsty Coventry, outspoken on defending girls’s sports activities
Seen as a controversial alternative, Coventry has been outspoken together with her views on transgender folks in single-sex sports activities, arguing that sports activities must be categorised by the organic intercourse of an athlete and never what gender they establish as.
Reported by the Telegraph, she stated she wished to ‘guarantee equity in girls’s sport and preserve the integrity of ladies’s classes.’ Coventry highlighted the risks of permitting male-born athletes to compete in girls’s classes, significantly in bodily contact sports activities.
The seven-time Olympic medallist was invited to the IOC’s Athletes’ Fee in 2012, and her election to the presidency heralds a brand new period for the committee, with excessive expectations that she’s going to deliver a recent perspective to urgent points akin to athlete rights.
