MILAN — Perhaps the Milano-Cortina 2026 Winter Games will be prove a welcome distraction.
The International Olympic Committee could use it.
The IOC president, Kirsty Coventry, in a news conference at the end of the group’s Milan assembly, said it is “at a pivoting point.”
Challenges with both the Olympic business model and the human resources culture in Lausanne and perhaps beyond now seem to be surfacing at multiple levels and at a rapid pace. That would suggest symptoms of way bigger issues.
Insiders at World Athletics are believed to have stolen about $1.75 million over “a period of several years,” prompting the federation to pursue criminal cases while launching “a set of enhanced internal financial controls,” it said in a statement.
The federation said it discovered the “systemic theft” earlier this year. The focus, it said in the statement, centers on two former employees and a contracted consultant. At issue: fake or doctored invoices.
One of the two ex-employees left before the theft was discovered. The other, and the consultant, “had their contracts terminated,” the federation said in that statement, offered in response to an inquiry about the matter.
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.
The Olympic Charter is very clear.
It says, point 5, “Recognizing that sport occurs within the framework of society, sports organizations within the Olympic Movement shall apply political neutrality.”
As matters stand, the Israeli team is unable to compete at the gymnastics world championships - due to begin Oct. 19 - in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.
Why? The government of Indonesia has denied visas to a six-person Israeli delegation amid the war with Hamas in Gaza. The Israeli team includes Artem Dolgopyat, who won the floor exercise at both the 2020 Olympics and 2023 worlds; he took silver in Paris in 2024.
This is just wrong.
Until Thursday, in the women’s 400, only two women had gone under 48 seconds, both from the 1980s — Marita Koch of East Germany and Jarmila Kratochvilová of what was then Czechoslovakia. Koch went 47.60 in 1985. Two years earlier, at the 1983 worlds in Helsinki, Kratochvilová went 47.99.
Until Thursday, that was the championship record.
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone crossed in 47.78.
Marileidy Paulino of the Dominican Republic, the Paris 2024 Olympic and 2023 worlds champion, finished in 47.98 — one-hundredth faster than Kratochvilová. But good enough only for second.
The female category in sport is for women and girls – individuals with XX chromosomes.
Identity is not biology.
To pretend otherwise is not only to make a mockery of any notion of fairness but, in the case of boxing, risk serious injury or worse.
Now, with Algeria’s Imane Khelif said to be on the verge of returning to competition, World Boxing has announced that Khelif, winner of a gold medal at the Paris Games, must take a chromosome test to prove eligibility – in its words, undergo “mandatory sex testing.”
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.
Larry Buendorf, who for decades kept the U.S. Olympic Committee safe in a turbulent world, died Sunday in Colorado Springs. He was 87.
Buendorf, a former U.S. Secret Service agent well known for breaking up an assassination attempt on President Gerald Ford in 1975, served as the USOC’s director of security from the early 1990s through his retirement in 2018 — seeing the athletes, team and leadership through the 1996 Atlanta Games bombing, the fraught years after 9/11 and so much more.
His passing marks the end of an era. He was a link to a bygone time at the USOC — now, for that matter, the USOPC.
Boonie, as he was known by almost everyone, was — unequivocally, irrefutably, no question about it — one of the good guys.
