Who is Kirsty Coventry? Former Olympian swimmer wants to be International Olympic Committee first female President - battling against Sebastian Coe
The rumour has been floated that Coventry, who participated at every Olympic Games between 2004 and 2016 and with seven medals is Africa’s most successful Olympic athlete, has outgoing IOC President Thomas Bach’s seal of approval. However it has not yet been confirmed and suspicions still persist.
She is a candidate for IOC President, alongside Sebastian Coe. According to Forbes, when she returned to her native Harare after the Athens Olympics having won Zimbabwe’s only three medals — its second, third, and fourth Olympic medals ever — the country was in the throes of an “official hate campaign” against white citizens. Yet when Coventry, who is white, appeared at the airport in Harare after winning a medal of each colour in Athens, she was greeted as a national heroine.
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Hide AdShe recalled: “When I got home it was a time of three days or four days of peace, and so I really got to see the power of sport. It wasn’t just understanding how powerful and how transformative sport can be, but I’ve actually seen it and I’ve walked in it, and I want to continue doing that.”


This ambition has led Coventry, who since 2017 has been Minister of Sport, Art and Recreation in Zimbabwe, to her bid for the Presidency of an organisation that before 1981 did not have any female members. It took most of another decade before one was elected to the IOC Executive Board.
At 41, Coventry is the youngest candidate by a decade, and the one most likely to be in tune with Generation Z. In a Q and A with reporters at the end of January, Coventry was the only candidate to face questions from the media about balancing being a parent and IOC President at the same time.
She said: “I had to quickly learn how to navigate and be a woman with a career as well as a mum and a wife and everything else, and it can be done. I’m very lucky to come from Africa, because culturally we know and we firmly believe that it takes a village to raise a child, so I have incredible support that will continue in this leadership role.”
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