“Our golden girl.” That was how Robert Mugabe, the murderous tyrant who ruled Zimbabwe for 37 years, described Kirsty Coventry as she returned home from the 2008 Beijing Games clutching the second Olympic swimming title of her career. This problematic association continues to cling to her as she assumes the most powerful office in global sport. After all, her elevation to the presidency of the International Olympic Committee has been prefaced by almost seven years as sports minister in the government of Emmerson Mnangagwa, leader of the Zanu-PF party and Mugabe’s hand-picked successor. Only this week she was castigated on Newsweek by Mohamed Keita, the Africa Senior Policy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation, as the “soft face of a dictatorship”.
The label feels especially apt as she is ensconced as successor to Thomas Bach, who for 13 years has masqueraded as the kindly figurehead of the Olympic movement, while acting like a ruthless autocrat. Coventry’s stunning election success here in Greece, achieving an absolute majority in the first round of voting to become the IOC’s first female president, represents the most vivid expression of Bach’s desire to install a continuity candidate, rather than a genuine reformer like Lord Coe. But it also brings unprecedented scrutiny of her credentials. And one question that cropped up repeatedly in her first press conference as president was her record in serving one of Africa’s most controversial regimes.
It was not an issue she shirked. “In terms of my country, I chose to try to create change from the inside,” she said. “Yes, it gets criticised. But that’s OK. I don’t believe you can scream from the sidelines to create change. I believe you have to be seated at the table.” The same philosophy has applied to her style at the IOC. In some ways she has risen without trace, only securing a spot on the athletes’ commission in 2012 when the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled against two of her opponents. But the patronage of Bach has since ensured a meteoric ascent.
On the surface, Coventry is a refreshing antidote to the IOC’s image as a desiccated patriarchy. At 41, she is the second youngest ever to assume the role, with the sight in Costa Navarino of her two daughters – five-year-old Ella and five-month-old baby Lily – accentuating an impression of the consummate working mother. Unlike her rival candidates, she did not retain the services of heavyweight PR agencies, instead working on her campaign with her husband Tyrone. She exists almost in soft focus, polite and platitudinous in her manner, far removed from the hauteur of her predecessors. It was striking, in the hours after the vote, how well-wishers addressed her not as “Madam President-Elect” – Bach has always been “Mr President” to his acolytes – but simply as “Kirsty”.
It is in her native Zimbabwe that less comfortable questions arise. The optics of her connections to Mnangagwa – otherwise known as “Crocodile”, a nod to his past as leader of the “Crocodile Gang”, a guerrilla group that attacked white-owned farms in the 1960s – are unflattering. That is before we address the vexed issue that, in 2020, she accepted a lease on a farm seized at the height of Mugabe’s land grab. Critics in her homeland characterised this as a reward for her unswerving political loyalty. Coventry has refused to comment. She has also neglected to speak out against any of the crackdowns of dissent launched by Zanu-PF, which has been known to throw journalists critical of the president into prison.
In her IOC manoeuvres, she has been similarly reluctant to rock the boat. When Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting won gold medals in women’s boxing in Paris last summer, despite sex tests indicating the presence of male chromosomes, she sat on the executive board that enabled the travesty. Her presidential manifesto was vanilla, not even acknowledging the need to protect the female category in sport. Only when Coe highlighted the subject did she take a stance, declaring: “When it comes to international competition and the Olympic Games, there are just two categories: male and female.”
She has promised to create a “taskforce” to investigate the issue. With luck, the IOC will finally move beyond its risible position of “no presumed advantage” for biologically male athletes or those with differences in sexual development. But Coventry is nothing like as strong in this area as Coe, who has consistently argued that biology trumps gender, while accusing the IOC of caving in to “second-rate sociologists” in its pursuit of inclusion of all costs. We now know that this most stubborn of private clubs is not ready to hear such a bracing message. Coe ruffled too many feathers with his boldness, whether in standing up for female athletes or in offering cash rewards for Olympic champions in track and field.
It has all culminated in the indignity of falling at the first hurdle in this election, picking up a mere eight votes of a possible 97. For somebody who, at 68, has won just about every significant race to which he has committed, it is a bruising result. Vastly more decorated and experienced as a candidate, he has found himself eclipsed by a low-profile insider. Perhaps we should not be surprised. The abiding sense this week is of a cosy coterie who would like things to stay exactly as they are, with the obsequious tributes to Bach giving way to a crushing win for his anointed heir. Her disciples celebrate her as a trailblazer, and yet Coventry’s triumph offers a salutary reminder not just of Bach’s power but of this organisation’s ingrained aversion to change.
