Kirsty Coventry has been president of the International Olympic Committee for, by her count at a news conference Thursday, 318 days.
In almost every meaningful way, Coventry is now executing a pivot away from predecessor Thomas Bach, IOC president from September 2013 until last June. Indeed, it is said behind the scenes in Lausanne, at IOC headquarters, that Coventry has little to maybe no interest in the past — only what lies ahead.
MILAN — Vladyslav Heraskevych, the Ukrainian skeleton racer disqualified for insisting he wanted to race in a helmet adorned with the faces of athletes killed by Russia, had said he was hoping for a new “miracle on ice.”
Instead, and predictably, came this ruling: the IOC was right to disqualify him because Olympic rules “state that freedom of speech is a fundamental right of any athlete competing in the Olympic Games, but limit the right to express views during competitions on the field of play.”
MILAN — The International Olympic Committee had no choice, really, but to disqualify the Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych. Rules are rules.
For his part, Heraskevych, by putting himself at the center of a frenzy he could know with unequivocal certainty would explode to become the centerpiece of this first week of the 2026 Milano-Cortina Games, delivered a master class in orchestrating a media strategy to maximum effect.
This controversy threatens to become one of the defining storylines in the history — the telling — of the 2026 Winter Games. If it’s about rules, it’s equally — if not more — about narrative and, in this context, narrative’s increasingly frequent traveling partner, raw emotion.
MILAN — For those who know about California, and those who don’t: Oakland is east of San Francisco, across the Bay Bridge. The author Gertrude Stein grew up in Oakland. She would later write, famously, about her hometown: there is no there there.
In Milan, as it relates to the 2026 Winter Games: there is no here here.
These Games have, like, zero buzz.
MILAN — In her remarks Friday at the Milano-Cortina 2026 opening ceremony, IOC president Kirsty Coventry invoked the African philosophy called ubuntu.
The essence of ubuntu, linked in particular in history to Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Demond Tutu, is that one’s humanity is inextricably connected to the humanity of everyone else.
What might ubuntu mean for the way the IOC operates, as a touchstone for key decisions, the way the organization — which dates to 1894 — positions itself in these middle years of the 21st century? The IOC is, has always been, Eurocentric. And now this rooted-in-Africa philosophy? Can Kirsty Coventry get ubuntu buy-in?
The immediate past president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach, served for 12 years with this elegant guiding notion: “unity in diversity.”\
Six years ago, Bach wrote a column published in The Guardian, the British newspaper, that read, in part: “The Olympic Games cannot prevent wars and conflicts. Nor can they address all the political and social challenges in our world. But they can set an example for a world where everyone respects the same rules and one another.”
The new IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, elected in March, faces enormous challenge in delivering on the aspirational promise of the Olympics that Bach articulated so eloquently.
That mission is at grave risk because the government of Indonesia is not allowing a six-member Israeli team to compete in the world gymnastics championships due to begin next week in Jakarta.
The IOC’s mission then is the mission now: to put sport at the “service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity,” as it says in the Olympic Charter.
COSTA NAVARINO, Greece – The International Olympic Committee, founded in 1894, has had nine presidents.
All have been white men. Eight have been Europeans. Avery Brundage, 1952-72, was American.
On Thursday, in just a single round of voting, the IOC elected Kirsty Coventry, 41, of Zimbabwe, its 10th president. She will formally take over from Thomas Bach in June in Lausanne. He was elected in 2013 and is termed out.
COSTA NAVARINO, Greece – Before Thursday’s vote here for the next president of the International Olympic Committee, it’s worth taking a moment to think about what might have been.
And how one of the most shocking deaths in the Olympic scene reverberates, still – with a warning for what is to come in arguably the most consequential IOC presidential election, ever.
It was the summer of 2018, and on the outdoor patio of the Royal Savoy hotel in Lausanne, Patrick Baumann and a few others were enjoying cigars and libations.
Three months later, he was gone — dead of a heart attack at the Buenos Aires Youth Games.
