Kirsty Coventry won her first Olympic medal in Athens in 2004, swimming the 200 backstroke in a time most of us couldn’t manage if you put a great white shark in lane two. She won six more after that. On Wednesday, the International Olympic Committee elected her president, making her the first woman and the first African to hold the job in 131 years, and the organization is acting like it just split the atom.
I want to be clear about Coventry. The woman is the real article. She’s a seven-time Olympic medalist from Zimbabwe who got in the water at five in the morning for twenty years and came out of it with hardware nobody can take off her. If you’ve ever swum a 200 back, you understand. If you haven’t, just know that the last fifty meters feels like trying to outrun a memory of yourself. She earned the chair.
The IOC, however, has earned nothing, and is taking a victory lap anyway. The press release used the word “historic” four times in two paragraphs, which is the linguistic equivalent of a guy holding the door for one woman in 1974 and bringing it up at every Christmas dinner since. It took them a hundred and thirty-one years and seven previous presidents — six counts, one barons, and one marquis, I’m not making any of that up — to elect somebody who has actually competed in the Olympics. The bar wasn’t on the floor. The bar was buried.
Coach DiMaggio, my old high school coach, had a PE teacher down the hall named Mrs. Bevilacqua who in 1962 could outrun every boy in the building, including the seniors, including the kid who eventually walked on at Penn State. Nobody put out a press release. She just kept showing up at six in the morning and beating people. Coach used to say leadership wasn’t a thing you announced, it was a thing other people noticed about you eventually, usually after the fact. He’d have looked at this IOC business and said something unprintable and gone back to lining the field.
Ray Kowalczyk called me Wednesday afternoon, as he does whenever sports does something he doesn’t understand, which is most days now. “Duke,” he said, “is it a big deal or isn’t it.” I told him it was a big deal because of who she is and a small deal because of who they are, and Ray said that was the most diplomatic thing he’d ever heard come out of my mouth and he didn’t trust it. He’s right not to.
Because here’s the thing about the IOC. It is not a sports organization. It is a travel club for men in blazers who hold their meetings in Lausanne and refer to themselves as “members” the way people in cults refer to themselves as members. They have a per diem that would embarrass a cardinal. They award the Olympics to whichever government is most willing to bulldoze a neighborhood and call it a legacy project. They spent the last thirty years giving the Games to autocrats and acting surprised when the autocrats used them like autocrats use everything. And now they have appointed an actual swimmer to run it, which I suspect is going to feel, for the IOC, a little bit like sobering up at a wedding.
Coventry is going to walk into a job where the actual sport — the kid in Botswana with a stopwatch and a dream, the gymnast in Romania, the rower from a country I have to look up — is item nineteen on a forty-item agenda. Items one through eighteen are sponsorship tiers, broadcast rights, the Saudi question, the Russia question, the doping question that nobody wants to actually answer, and whether breakdancing gets a second chance. I wish her luck. I mean it. The athletes deserve someone in that chair who has been cold and tired and underwater at five in the morning, and now they have one.
What they don’t have, and what nobody ever has, is an IOC that deserves its own employees. The minute Coventry tries to clean up something real, the blazers are going to remember they preferred a count. Watch.
Denise is bringing chili tonight. She heard about Coventry on a podcast and asked me if it was a big deal. I said it was a big deal for Coventry and a small deal for the IOC and Denise said that was the most diplomatic thing she’d ever heard come out of my mouth and she didn’t trust it either. The chili, for the record, is excellent.