Jörg Krieger1, Jaime Schultz2 & Lindsay Parks Pieper3
1 Aarhus University & University of Inland Norway:
2 Pennsylvania State University; 3 University of Lynchburg
After 131 years, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has finally elected its first woman president: 41-year-old Kirsty Coventry, a five-time Olympic swimmer who represented Zimbabwe from 2000 to 2016. She is Africa’s most decorated Olympian and the first African to hold the IOC’s highest office.
Coventry’s rise reflects broader institutional shifts, including a slow but measurable increase in women’s representation within the IOC in recent years. Although the headlines rightly celebrate this moment as a win for gender equity, it is important to approach the occasion with a critical lens. Coventry’s election is both a symbolic and strategic victory—a product of long-standing pressures for reform and representation in Olympic leadership. But symbolism alone does not dismantle deep-rooted power structures that persist. In what we call a “critical celebration,” this commentary traces earlier milestones in women’s Olympic leadership to historically contextualize Coventry’s appointment. While we show how far the movement has come, we also highlight how far there is still to go.
Coventry’s election is especially monumental when considering the glacial pace at which women have assumed leadership roles within the Olympic Movement. A founder of the modern Olympics and second IOC President (1896–1925), Pierre de Coubertin, opposed women’s participation in the Olympic movement–as both athletes and organizers. In response, French rower and activist Alice Milliat emerged as a leading advocate for women’s sport. She organized the Women’s Olympics in the 1920s to counter the IOC’s refusal to include women’s athletics. By creating parallel structures, Milliat exposed the male-dominated nature of the Olympic Movement and forced its leaders to reconsider their stance on women’s participation. The IOC consented to incorporate women’s athletics into the Olympic Games in exchange for Milliat’s agreement to change the name of her event. Her actions were an early—and radical—form of leadership that redefined what was possible for women in global sport governance. However, even though Milliat’s efforts successfully expanded the women’s Olympic programme, her actions had the unfortunate consequence of eliminating women from positions of power. In other words, the IOC incorporated women as athletes, but not as leaders.
A much lesser-known milestone came in 1961 when Danish-British archer Inger Kristine Frith was elected president of World Archery, making her the first woman to lead an international sport federation. Her gender was so anomalous that some male officials initially addressed correspondence to “Mr. Frith” – prompting Frith to politely remind them of her ‘feminine pride’ and that she was, indeed, a woman. The lack of women as IF presidents continued long after Frith retired in 1977.
Eight years after Frith’s election, Monique Berlioux (France) became the first woman to hold a senior administrative position within the IOC. A former swimmer (like Coventry), Berlioux became IOC head of the IOC administration in 1969, a position she held until 1985. In this capacity, Berlioux played a crucial role in the IOC’s negotiations with broadcasting companies. However, while she held influence over internal operations, Berlioux was neither an IOC member nor had an official vote in Olympic matters, showing the committee’s continued resistance to women’s power.
This changed in 1981. IOC members voted Flor Isava Fonseca (Venezuela) and Pirjo Häggman (Finland) as the committee’s first female constituents with voting power, breaking an 87-year tradition of an all-male IOC membership. Fonseca also became the first woman member of the IOC’s powerful Executive Board, a position she held from 1990 to 1994. Still, progress was limited, and women made up less than 10% of the IOC’s membership throughout the 1980s.
In the following decades, despite initiatives such as the 1994 Brighton Declaration and the inaugural IOC World Conference on Women and Sport in 1996, women remained underrepresented in all aspects of IOC leadership, even as Olympic women athletes inched closer to parity. Another milestone for gender equity in Olympic leadership came with the IOC’s Gender Equality Review Project, approved in 2018 as part of Olympic Agenda 2020. The project set a clear target: equal representation of women and men in executive IOC leadership by 2024. By the 2020/2021 Olympics, women comprised 36.3% of IOC members and 26.7% of the Executive Board. Many of the initiatives of the Gender Equality Review Project came to fruition at the Paris 2024 Olympics. Women’s representation on the Executive Board reached 46.7% and women athletes constituted an unprecedented 49.2% of participants.
While Coventry’s election is “groundbreaking” and merits a long-overdue celebration, it mustn’t distract from the critically important work still needed to achieve gender equity in Olympic leadership. As recent reports show, there is still a significant lack of women in leadership positions in other areas of the Olympic Movement. Since Frith’s presidency of World Archery in the 1960s, only seven other women have presided over the international federations (IF) of Olympic sports. As of March 2025, only three women—Annika Sörenstam of the International Golf Federation, Petra Sölring of the International Table Tennis Federation and Marisol Casado of World Triathlon—serve as IF presidents. A Women’s Sport Federation report likewise found that women only held 27.8% of IF Executive Board positions in 2024. Of the thirty-two recognized IFs by the IOC, seven had executive boards with less than 20% women members.
Women are also underrepresented at the national levels of Olympic sport governance. In 2024, twenty-four women and 182 men served as National Olympic Committee presidents. Perhaps most notably, women remain severely underrepresented as coaches. At the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, only 13% of coaches were women, a figure that is thought to have dropped at the 2024 Paris Olympics. In winter sports the number is even lower: only 10% of coaches were women at the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing.
Coventry’s election, secured with a clear majority in the first round, is a sign of strong support from within the IOC. Winning outright in the first round of voting is a rare achievement in IOC presidential elections. The decisive victory may also be linked to the steady increase in female IOC members over the past decades, demonstrating that representation can directly influence leadership outcomes. Although this is an important milestone, it must not be mistaken for the endpoint of gender equity within sport governance. The true measure of progress will be whether Coventry’s election leads to structural changes that extend beyond the IOC and into the leadership of international federations, National Olympic Committees, and grassroots sport organizations. Without broader systemic change, her presidency risks being a historic exception rather than a precedent-setting transformation. Progress at the highest level must trickle down—otherwise, it remains symbolic rather than substantive.
Copyright © Jörg Krieger, Jaime Schultz & Lindsay Parks Pieper 2025
