Who is Kirsty Coventry, the next president of the International Olympic Committee?

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Who is Kirsty Coventry, the next president of the International Olympic Committee?

2025-03-21 03:23 Last Updated At：03:31

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — The next president of the International Olympic Committee is a former Zimbabwe swimmer who is Africa's most decorated Olympian and a minister in a government often accused of oppressing political opposition.

Kirsty Coventry, 41, was elected to one of the most powerful jobs in sports on Thursday, becoming the first woman and first African to lead the Olympic movement.

She will begin her eight-year term in charge of the IOC in June.

Coventry was the back-to-back Olympic champion in the 200 meters backstroke in 2004 and 2008. She retired from swimming after the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 with seven Olympic medals, more than anyone else from Africa.

By then she was already an IOC member, getting her place in 2013 almost one year after an initial result of an athlete election at the London Olympics was overturned in part because she filed a complaint against an opponent.

Coventry is also currently Zimbabwe's minister of youth, sports, arts and recreation, drawing some scrutiny of her affiliation with a government that has long faced accusations of cracking down on democratic freedoms and suppressing criticism in the southern African country.

Her country and the government she serves in has been targeted with sanctions by the United States and the European Union.

At the height of her swimming career, Coventry was praised and rewarded with a diplomatic passport and $100,000 by late Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, an autocratic leader who ruled his country for 37 years until he was removed in a military-backed coup in 2017.

Mugabe called her Zimbabwe's “Golden Girl,” and she was widely praised across racial lines as a source of pride in her country at a time when it was reeling from Mugabe's policy of violently seizing farmland from white people.

Coventry became the minister of sports a year after the coup that removed Mugabe in the new administration of current President Emmerson Mnangagwa, Mugabe's vice president who rights groups say has continued many of Mugabe's oppressive policies.

Coventry was just 34 when she was appointed a government minister in a move that was greeted with surprise because she was young and had little political experience, but also because she is white. She was reappointed sports minister after disputed elections in 2023.

She said in a victory news conference Thursday that she will likely resign as Zimbabwe's sports minister and move full-time to the IOC's home city Lausanne, Switzerland.

Coventry attended an all-girls convent school in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare. She went to college at Auburn University in Alabama and became one of its star swimmers. She made her Olympic debut in Sydney in 2000 while still in high school. She won three medals in the 2004 Athens Olympics and four medals at the 2008 Beijing Games.

From 2018 to 2021, Coventry was the athlete representative on the IOC executive board under Thomas Bach, the man she was elected to succeed. Coventry left some athlete groups frustrated that she followed the IOC and Bach policy line too closely.

Coventry's effectiveness as a sports leader in her home country has been questioned by some. Zimbabwe has been banned from hosting international soccer games by the African confederation since 2020 because it doesn't have a stadium that meets the required standard.

During Coventry's first news conference as the next IOC president, the Zimbabwe men's team was playing a “home” game in a 2026 World Cup qualifying group in Durban in neighboring South Africa because of its stadium problems.

Zimbabwe was also temporarily suspended from international soccer by world body FIFA in 2022 because of government interference. Zimbabwe was allowed back into international soccer in 2023.

Father of the last living American hostage in Gaza hopes Trump can bring his son home

2025-03-23 02:39 Last Updated At：02:41

TEL AVIV (AP) — Unlike many families who blame Israel's government for not getting their loved ones released from captivity in Gaza, Adi Alexander is hesitant to point fingers. Pragmatic and measured, the father of the last living American being held hostage by Hamas just wants his son to come home.

“I don't want to get into who came first, the egg or the chicken,” Alexander told The Associated Press on Friday from his New Jersey home. Still, with the once-promising ceasefire giving way to renewed fighting between Israel and Hamas, he wonders whether Israel can secure his son's freedom and is more hopeful about the U.S.'s chances to do it.

Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old Israeli-American soldier who grew up in the U.S., is one of 59 hostages still in Gaza, more than half of whom are believed to be dead. Last week, Hamas said it would release Edan and the bodies of four other hostages if Israel recommitted to the stalled ceasefire agreement.

Days later, though, Israel launched rockets across Gaza, breaking the two-month-old deal and killing hundreds of Palestinians. The hostilities show no signs of abating, with Israel vowing Friday to advance deeper into Gaza until Hamas releases the remaining hostages.

The return to fighting has inflamed the debate in Israel over the fate of those held captive. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has come under mounting domestic pressure, with mass protests over his handling of the hostage crisis. But he also faces demands from his hard-line allies not to accept any deal that falls short of Hamas’ destruction.

Adi Alexander said he thinks Netanyahu wants to bring everybody home, but on his own terms. He questions Netanyahu's plans whereas he believes U.S. President Donald Trump's message is clear: He's focused on bringing the hostages home. Alexander said he's counting on the U.S. to bridge the large gap between Israel and Hamas. His message to Trump about his administration's efforts to free his son and the others: “Just keep this job going."

Many families of the hostages say Trump has done more for them than Netanyahu, crediting the president with the ceasefire. In December, before taking office, Trump demanded the hostages' immediate release, saying if they weren’t freed before he was sworn in for his second term there would be “hell to pay.”

Phase one of the deal began weeks later, and saw the release of 25 Israeli hostages and the bodies of eight others in exchange for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. The ceasefire was supposed to remain in place as long as talks on the second phase continued, but Netanyahu balked at entering substantive negotiations.

Instead, he tried to force Hamas to accept a new ceasefire plan put forth by U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff. That plan would have required Hamas to release half its remaining hostages — the militant group’s main bargaining chip — in exchange for a ceasefire extension and a promise to negotiate a lasting truce.

Hamas has said it will only release the remaining hostages in exchange for a lasting ceasefire and a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, as called for in the original ceasefire agreement mediated by the United States, Egypt and Qatar.

As a soldier, Edan would have been released during the deal’s second phase. But Hamas announced this month that it would release Edan after the White House said it had engaged in “ongoing talks and discussions” with the group — separate from the main negotiations. It is the first known direct engagement between Hamas and the U.S. since the State Department designated it a foreign terrorist organization in 1997.

Adi Alexander said Adam Boehler, who's helping spearhead the Trump administration's efforts to free the hostages, led those separate talks because phase two was stalled. But he said he didn’t believe Hamas’ claim that it would release his son because it came out of left field and wasn't being considered as part of the discussions between the group and Boehler.

The anxious father said he speaks with Witkoff and Boehler almost daily and understands the negotiations are ongoing despite the resumption of fighting.

A native of Tenafly, a New Jersey suburb of New York City, Edan moved to Israel in 2022 after high school and enlisted in the military. He was abducted from his base during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that ignited the war, when Hamas killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took 251 others hostage.

Since Edan's abduction, there's been little news about him.

Hamas released a video of him over Thanksgiving weekend in November. His family said it was difficult to watch as he cried and pleaded for help, but it was a relief to see he was alive.

Freed hostages have given the family more news, according to his father. Some said Edan had lost a lot of weight. Others said he'd been an advocate for fellow hostages, standing up for kidnapped Thai workers and telling their captors that the workers weren’t Israeli and should be freed.

Although he knows the resumption of fighting means it will take more time to get his son back, Adi Alexander said he thinks both sides had became too comfortable with the ceasefire and that this was one reason phase two never began. He wants the war to end, and hopes the fighting will be limited and targeted and push everyone back to the table.

“Somebody, I think had to shake this tree to create chaos, and chaos creates opportunities," he said. “The only objective is to get back to the bargaining table to get those people out.”