Kirsty Coventry has simply shattered the glass ceiling to turn out to be 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 high to exchange the controversial Thomas Bach, taking the highest job in world sport. ‘It’s a sign that we’re really world and that we now have advanced into an organisation that’s really open to range, and we’re going to proceed,’ she mentioned 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 mentioned that she would spend the following few months working with Thomas Bach to make sure a clean handover of obligations and to trade some key concepts.
Kirsty Coventry, outspoken on defending girls’s sports activities
Seen as a controversial selection, Coventry has been outspoken along with her views on transgender individuals in single-sex sports activities, arguing that sports activities needs to be categorised by the organic intercourse of an athlete and never what gender they determine as.
Reported by the Telegraph, she mentioned she needed to ‘guarantee equity in girls’s sport and keep 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 is going to carry a contemporary perspective to urgent points similar to athlete rights.