Online Reporter
Wisdom Mugute
There is no doubt that Kirsty Coventry is an athlete and sport administrator of great integrity.
Her competitiveness as an athlete saw her win a lot of medals for her country.
Coventry’s reign as Zimbabwe’s Minister of Sport was stainless, smooth and corruption free.
Her elevation to the top echelons of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) came as no surprise; her credentials cannot be doubted; her will, determination and commitment to restoring dignity, competitiveness, fairness and integrity to world sport, has been clear.
She has ideological clarity as to what should be done to depoliticise IOC, to redefine gender, to be inclusive and to avoid mistakes done by the previous administration.
In the past administration the trajectory of human sport changed under the guise of Western-centric human rights, where female athletes were made to compete unfairly with men, who changed their sex to disguised as women.
That caused a lot of discomfort as the system was manipulated by many transgenders. The United States and its allies in Western Europe, took gender issues too far, to the point where sport was almost collapsing.
Men competed as women but no woman competed as a man. Gender change became acceptable and yet it destroyed fairness.
The dirty politics between the East and the West was so telling that athletes from Russia and Belarus were banned from competing under the country’s flags, in blatant disregard of sportsmanship.
Coventry herself competed under the Zimbabwean flag and understands the pride that comes with competing for your country. There is pride in it. There is dignity in it. There is nationalism in it. There is life in it.
So, the US leveraged on its stranglehold on the Thomas Bach administration at IOC to play dirty politics and ban Russian and Belarusian athletes, as a way of dehumanising them, as a way of de-nationalising them, as a way of undignifying them and finally as a way of getting to the core of the Putin administration. How sly? How silly? How uncouth, scarious and scandalous?
As it stands Coventry is the only hope of the progressive thinking world to depoliticise IOC, restore its dignity, give it a new outlook at a purely sports organisation.
The chance if there for Coventry to set things right.
The IOC executive board will hold its final meeting of 2025 on December 9-10 at Olympic House in Lausanne, Switzerland.
This is the right opportunity to set things right and, of course, remnants of the Bach administration, still want to maintain hegemony on the dirty past on the horrible past.
Yes, Russian athletes are currently banned from competing under their own flag, name, or anthem at the Olympic Games and other major international events.
This is a consequence of sanctions imposed by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) related to the US-manufactured country’s state-sponsored doping scandal and its special military operation in Ukraine.
Many progressive thinking sportsmen cannot find the nexus between the war in Ukraine and sports people competing at the IOC.
At the moment only Russian athletes who can prove they are not involved in doping and do not actively support the war in Ukraine may still compete as neutral athletes. They compete under a different designation and specific rules:
For the Paris 2024 Olympics and the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, they competed and will compete as “Individual Neutral Athletes” (AIN).
In previous games (Pyeongchang 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022), they competed as “Olympic Athletes from Russia” (OAR) or the “Russian Olympic Committee” (ROC).
The athletes are not allowed to display the Russian national flag or national emblems, and the national anthem is not played if they win a gold medal. A one-off instrumental anthem and a flag with a circular “AIN” emblem are used instead.
AIN athletes were not allowed to participate in the parade of nations during the Paris 2024 opening ceremony.
Teams of Russian athletes are generally not permitted to compete; only individual athletes are allowed to participate after a rigorous vetting process.
Well, this is certainly an afront to the development of sport as enshrined in the agenda and ideology of IOC.
It is sad that innocent athletes have had their dreams shattered simply because of international politics, which they have no control over.
Many athletes in Russia have had their sporting career disenfranchised by the US politics and yet, they would have performed wonders and even taken care of their families from sport. They could have lived on sport.
Therefore, Coventry has a mammoth task to set the sporting world free from international politics. She has to depoliticise sport.
The world is currently judging harshly the outgoing IOC leadership for being cruel to athletes, who are not politicians.
They have no control over politics. They are simply gifted men and women, who want to express their capabilities and earn a living from them.
Only Coventry can stop the madness and she would have her name eked in history books for bringing back sanity to the world of sport.
