Kirsty Coventry was elected on Thursday as the 10th president of the International Olympic Committee, capping a monthslong election battle and becoming the first woman and the first African to hold the most powerful role in sports.
The election, which has been described in similar language to a papal conclave, was settled — to gasps by onlookers — in the very first round of secret voting by the International Olympic Committee’s membership, an eclectic group that features not only sports leaders but also royals, business moguls and even Hollywood stars.
The victory immediately vaults Ms. Coventry to the very top of global sports, into a position that requires diplomatic, financial and management acumen as well as knowledge of sports. The I.O.C. president must manage an institution responsible for awarding and staging Games every two years that generate billions of dollars and are coveted by politicians around the world as they seek to bolster their own and their nation’s profiles.
The role is not for the faint of heart.
The departing leader, Thomas Bach of Germany, a former gold medal-winning fencer, served a 12-year presidency marked by a series of crises, revelations that Russia had corrupted international sports for at least half a decade through a state-backed doping program, a revolt among some Western democracies over the cost of hosting the Olympics and a pandemic that upended the movement, forcing the Tokyo Olympics to be held behind closed doors a year later than scheduled.
For Ms. Coventry, there are urgent issues to deal with right at the start. The next Summer Olympics will take place in Los Angeles in 2028, at a time when American leadership around the world is under scrutiny. There are also significant decisions to be made about the rights of transgender athletes as well as about the challenges posed by the climate crisis.
“The next president will have a different set of problems,” said Michael Payne, a former marketing director of the I.O.C., which, he added, is an “organization like no other.”
