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.