Kirsty Coventry, Rebranding And The IOC

The International Olympic Committee, the sporting world’s equivalent of a white-collar crime family, has made its decision on who will succeed the outgoing president, Thomas Bach. Representatives gathered in Greece at Costa Navarino, to make their decision.

From the list of seven candidates, former Zimbabwean athlete and winner of seven medals, Kirsty Coventry, received the minimum number of votes for a first-round win: 49 of the 97 cast. She had been Bach’s preferred choice, bettering Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr. (28 votes) and Sebastian Coe (8 votes). At 41, she is the second-youngest IOC chief in history and its first woman president. From time to time, crime families will change tack.

It is clear that Coventry’s election might leave a strong impression that something is changing at the IOC. It gives the impression that a top female sporting administrator is necessarily going to improve the reputation of a body that has found escaping the orbit of habitual corruption and cynicism impossible.

The wheels of propaganda were certainly turning quickly after the vote. The Sports Examiner gave a good example of this, noting the increasing emphasis by the IOC leadership on the importance of picking athletes for top administrative positions, as opposed to the customary string of dreary businessmen, millionaires and entitled royalty. Bach’s 12 years in office had seen the elevation of both the number of athletes and women in the body of elected members, supplying “the demographic building blocks of Coventry’s 49 votes and her first-round victory.”

To stress that point was Israeli member and her country’s first Olympic medal winner, Yael Arad. “I think it’s big history for the Olympic Movement,” she declared to the same publication. “I think with great candidates with a lot of experience and two of them were Olympic champions, and I think for many of us it counts to be with a lot of skills and experience, but also really come from the bottom of the heart of the sport.”

Not merely content with this observation, Arad offered the believe-in-yourself gloss over Coventry’s victory. Here was “a great message” in both sport and “the world at large”, one for the dreamers. If you “work hard enough and you believe in yourself and people believe in you, you can make it.” If sporting administration is your thing, so be it.

The other aspect of Coventry’s campaign also tilted at Africanness, marked by rather generous references to the Ubuntu philosophy, which emphasises the collective over the individual: “I am because we are.”

Gender representation, being African, or athletic pedigree aside, much of the praise, a good deal of it needlessly cloying, says little about whether the practices of the IOC, let alone the implementation of their various policies, will dramatically alter under Coventry’s reign.

During her press conference as President-elect, Coventry gave scanty details on what would follow. She would maintain the status quo regarding the neutral flag participation of Russian and Belarussian athletes for the 2026 Winter Games, believing that “we need to do anything and everything to protect and support athletes from all conflict areas.” On transgender participation, she was stolidly bureaucratic: “I want the IOC to take a little more of a leading role. And we’re going to do that by setting up a workforce, a task force that will look and analyse everything.”

Little was given away on the more environmental or ecological aspect of the Games, which persist in altering local landscapes, redirecting and using valuable resources, and causing social disruption and hardships to local populations. Hovering in the background is the ghost of climate change in the planning of Olympic events, a point emphasised by over 400 athletes in their recent letter to IOC candidates. It asks the new president “that over the years and the course of your presidency one issue be above all others: the care of the planet.”

If Bach’s tenure is anything to go by, we will see a more cunning, slier version of planning in this regard. Having embraced an emissions reduction policy (50 per cent of direct and indirect emissions by 2030), the IOC would have you believe it’s wholeheartedly serious.

Grand claims, for instance, were made for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics as being “carbon neutral”. This was hard to square with the destruction of 20,000 trees in the Songshan National Nature Reserve in constructing an Olympic ski run, or the creation of artificial snow, thereby depleting invaluable water supplies.

The 2024 Paris summer games was also heralded as ecologically sound, with French Olympian Tony Estanguet promising an unsurpassed degree of sustainability. A carbon budget was generated, dividing travel at 34 per cent and operations (catering, accommodation, logistics), coming in at 33 per cent. Emphasis was placed on using existing and temporary infrastructure, in contrast to previous games such as Athens 2004. Bio-sourced materials were used, and reuse and recycling stressed.

The staging of the event suggested other things at play. Such sporting mega-events are incongruously described as sustainable despite making various omissions. The largest source of emissions arising from their staging tends to come from travel to and from the relevant location. (An estimate of 80 per cent is offered by Madeleine Orr.) The organisers of Paris 2024 also used what that keen observer of the Olympics, Jules Boykoff, called “dubious measurement instruments” marked by “processes […] too often shrouded in mystery.” The use of questionable carbon offsets was a particular feature of this.

The IOC also makes extensive use of deceptive carbon offsets in its highly misleading and exploitative Olympics Forest project. These have been made in the context of exploiting developing economies in the Global South, typified by the predatory practices of carbon credit companies prone to human rights abuses, land seizure practices and environmental degradation. Opacity is the name of the game.

Were Coventry to be truly revolutionary – and nothing so far suggests it – she would have to dissatisfy the wishes of both the administrators and the athletes. Short of the healthiest option – the abolition of the Games – would be a dramatically pared-back version marked by smaller audiences and less travel. What a different sight that would be.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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