Swimming at the
top table
Kirsty Coventry has chaired the International Olympic Committee’s Athletes’ Commission during a time when the body has faced regular criticism. Liam Morgan speaks to the swimming champion, who is tipped for a bright IOC future, as her term comes to an end.
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ut of touch”, “on the wrong side of history” and producing a survey with “pre-cooked” results. These are all allegations that have been levelled at the International Olympic Committee Athletes’ Commission, a much-derided body which rivals the Executive Board in the criticism stakes, in recent months. The Commission has been led through arguably its most turbulent period by Zimbabwean Kirsty Coventry, whose term at the helm concludes at the end of the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Top of Coventry’s in-tray in her lucrative IOC role - she is also Zimbabwe’s Sports Minister - before the postponement of the Games had been the discussion, debate and - at times diatribe surrounding the controversial Rule 50, which prohibits athletes from protesting on the podium or field of play.
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Kirsty Coventry won two Olympic gold medals in the pool and is now at the centre of sports governance. Photo: Getty Images
Amid a rise in athlete activism - a hot topic in the Olympic Movement and beyond, particularly since the murder of George Floyd in the United States last year - the Athletes’ Commission embarked on an 11-month process to determine whether the rule should be kept. At the end of the consultation, which included a survey responded to by more than 3,500 athletes, the stance will remain, although there were recommendations to clarify sanctions and provide more areas for competitors to express their views. Frequent critics of the Athletes’ Commission would have sarcastically raised their eyebrows and expressed mock surprise when the results were announced in a detailed report in April. After all, IOC President Thomas Bach had stated publicly his wish for the Olympics not to become a “marketplace of
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demonstrations”, leading some to allege the outcome had been pre-determined before the process had even begun. But Coventry, a two-time Olympic champion in swimming who was elected chair of the Commission in 2018, believes such claims are “not fair at all”. “We did not know how this was going to go so I think it is really unfair to say it was pre-cooked,” she said. “It is a cheap shot - it is going to get some people stirred up but when you look into the work that we did, the report speaks for itself. “We went out of our way to engage with everyone. We had individual and continental calls with Athlete Commissions, we did our own survey and we took the surveys from other Commissions into account. “At the beginning, when we laid out our plan, there was not that much negativity. Then when the results started coming out from certain
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