Kirsty Coventry has become the new IOC president. What will this give Russia?

Yana Martynova was on par with Kirsty Coventry

Kirsty Coventry is a former swimmer and the most titled of all seven candidates applying for the post of president of the International Olympic Committee. For some reason, remembering the two Olympic gold medals of her main competitor Sebastian Coe, many forgot that Kirsty is also a two-time gold medallist, and in terms of the number of regular medals from the Olympics, plus awards of various denominations from the world championships, she has no comparison with the Englishman. There was also the circumstance that the first world athletics championship took place only in 1983, when Coe was already 27 years old, but these are details.

It is amazing that at one point, in terms of sport, Kazan swimmer Yana Martynova turned out to be very close to Coventry. At the pre-Olympic World Championships of 2007 in Australia, which took place from 17 March to 1 April, which is somewhat unusual for swimming, since most of its starts are held in the summer, Coventry and Martynova synchronously won silver medals in two distances of medley swimming. The Zimbabwean, having swum 200 metres, and the Kazan woman twice as far, won their silver at the end of the championship, on April Fool's Day — 1 April. Both times the champion was the American Katie Hoff, the bronze was won twice by the Australian Stephanie Rice, and the vice-champions were the coach of one of the Kazan sports schools and the newly-minted president of the IOC. What a funny story!

However, Coventry became an even more memorable athlete for the Russian fish Stanislava Komarova, whom she overtook in the 200-metre backstroke at the 2004 Olympic Athens. In general, Coventry competed at a time when Russian swimming was in the same place as the inhabitants of Maxim Gorky's novel The Lower Depths. She won more awards than our entire national team beating Anastasia Fesikova, who was then competing under her maiden name Zuyeva, at the next Olympics in Beijing. This is all backstroke swimming, and it turns out that Coventry only crossed paths with Martynova in the complex, since Yana specialized in butterfly and long freestyle disciplines.

Russia has a swimmer who is a teammate of the new IOC president

However, Coventry's victories are not equal to the victories of her country, since the two-time Olympian lived and trained in America, in the state of Alabama, competing for the famous student multidisciplinary club Auburn Tigers. For Americans, its main graduate is basketball player Charles Barkley, for us — student swimmer Anastasia Makarova from Mytishchi who can call herself a teammate of the IOC president.

It is interesting that out of the eight Olympic medals of the Zimbabwean team, seven were won by Coventry, and the eighth, the very first, was won by hockey players at the 1980 Summer Olympics. Moreover, three months before the Moscow Olympics, they did not even plan to participate, since the country was still called Rhodesia, and it was ruled by, as they said then, the apartheid regime. But on 18 May 1980, Rhodesia turned into Zimbabwe, and on 31 July of the same year, its girls won Olympic gold in field hockey. debuting in the Games programme. Moreover, it is necessary to remember that in those years the Soviet Union and all progressive humanity fought against apartheid, and the state of South Africa that personified it, but now two of its athletes, Anthea Stewart and Sandy Chick, who previously played for the South African team, are in the Zimbabwe team. This is the second interesting point that I would like to mention.

And I would like to finish with a forecast for Coventry's decisions regarding Russia and Belarus in the Olympic arena, but somehow it does not work. There is neither the proper share of optimism nor pessimism. It seems that Coventry is such a, no offense, Madame Funt under Thomas Bach. The German is 71, he can no longer be the official president of the IOC, but behind the scenes — as much as you like. Moreover, a president with a wide amplitude of actions.

For forecasts, of course, it is necessary to think not only in the plane, but also in the volume. Same Bach perfectly demonstrated the variability of actions in relations with the President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko. When in 2019 Belarus triumphantly hosted the second European Games, an IOC project that is not yet enjoying due popularity in the Old World, Bach and Lukashenko behaved like best friends. The German awarded the president and Belarus with a jubilee Olympic medal, although he had previously been persona non grata at the 2012 London Olympics. True, the IOC was then headed by Belgian Jacques Rogge. The warm meeting in Minsk did not affect Bach's decision to again transfer Lukashenko to the status of persona non grata, only now before the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. This was the IOC's reaction to the presidential elections in Belarus, a purely internal matter for this country. “Let Bach and the gang tell me what my fault is...” Lukashenko was perplexed, which was perceived as a voice crying in the Olympic desert. Coe did not become president, and that is very good

The fact that Coventry (49 votes for her candidacy) was ahead of Juan Antonio Samaranch from Spain (28 votes) and was ahead of the Englishman Sebastian Coe (only 8 votes) by a huge margin is an optimistic sign for sports in Russia and Belarus. Let's not forget that our neighbours are in the same detached position as we are, with the exception of international football competitions where FIFA and UEFA allow them to compete.

Coe is a patented Russophobe, which he has proven by his actions over the past ten years. Having won one of his Olympic medals in the same Moscow in 1980, like the Zimbabwean hockey players, he continued to compete until Los Angeles, successfully combining two middle distances — 800 and 1500 meters. Coe, Steve Cram, Tom McKean, David Moorcroft, Steve Ovett, David Sharp — the 1980s were dominated by English middle-distance runners who, unlike the lone Zimbabwean star Coventry, finished in a pack while running fast.

The Englishman came to the helm of the IAAF, the International Athletics Federation, in August 2015, immediately lowering the barrier to Russian athletics. The World Junior Championships in Kazan were moved to Bydgoszcz, Poland... One file banned 4,027 athletes with Russian passports from participating in international competitions, from 13-year-olds to veterans. Among those banned at that time were even two deceased Russian athletes...

If we had a free hand, we could have entered the fight on the legal front, but the upcoming World Cup forced us to keep quiet. And under the noise, medals were taken away from Russians, like our runner Yulia Zaripova, only one participant was allowed to participate in the Olympics, like Daria Klishina at Rio 2016, and they were constantly forced to pay membership fees, not returning athletes to the starts.

The apotheosis of Sir Coe's double standards is the situation at the 2019 World Championships in Doha. During the championship, the existence of an entire doping team of American coach Alberto Salazar was revealed. But if earlier almost the entire cream of Anglo-Saxon athletics was listed among his wards, including the Englishman Mohammed Farah, then by the time Salazar was exposed, it turned out that the team did not exist. In other words, when doping was found, the students were lost. At the press conference, when asked how this could be, Coe responded by proposing to move on to the next question. During his presidency, all track and field corruption and criminality was concentrated in Russia, among 4,027 suspended track and field athletes, two of whom, let us recall, were suspended posthumously.

There is no doubt that Coe would have been much worse at the head of the IOC than Bach, although it would seem that it could not be worse. But Bach, using Lukashenko as an example, demonstrated that he was guided by a policy of carrot and stick, while Coe had only a stick prepared for our two countries, with which he continues to throw track and field athletes from both countries out of any competitions.

Juan Antonio Samaranch: in his father's footsteps

Samaranch Jr who took second place (28 votes) purely out of habit seemed the best candidate for Russia. Here, of course, the magic of his father, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was elected president of the IOC in Olympic Moscow, would have worked.

Moreover, it is necessary to understand that he headed the Olympic movement at the time of a serious crisis, comparable to the current one. The American Denver refused its right to host the 1972 Winter Olympics. The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal was remembered for the boycott of African countries dissatisfied with the liberal attitude of the IOC towards countries practicing apartheid, the same South Africa and Rhodesia. The Olympics in Moscow, and then Los Angeles in 1984, were two boycotts in a row, first by capitalist powers (USA, Canada, Germany, Japan, South Korea, etc.), and then by the countries of the Eastern bloc.

But Samaranch initially had a personal problem, which he successfully solved. The fact is that Spain and the USSR did not maintain diplomatic relations during the entire period when Spain was led by caudillo Francisco Franco. The countries even exchanged boycotts when in 1960 Spanish football players refused to play the quarterfinals of the European Championship with the USSR team, and in 1975 Soviet artists did not go to the World Cup in Madrid, during which Franco actually died.

At the same time, surprisingly, the countries maintained relations in the cultural sphere. In 1970, Yelena Obraztsova and Zurab Sotkilava became the first Soviet singers to perform at the International Vocal Competition in Barcelona, where they received the Grand Prix and an invitation to stay in Spain, which was accepted. Zurab Sotkilava (our symmetrical answer to Julio Iglesias) is a former football player for Sukhumi and Tbilisi Dynamo (from 1958 to 1959).

How one person helped to normalise relations that had been absent for 40 years

If we talk about the response in the Union, then former Real Madrid goalkeeper Julio Iglesias came to the USSR for a solo tour in 1974. Between Sotkilava's trips to Spain and Iglesias's tour of the USSR, there was the marriage of Irina Kuberskaya, a famous Soviet actress of those years, to a Spaniard who went to her husband's homeland. And this despite the fact that diplomatic relations between our countries were restored only on 9 February 1977. In those years, Juan Antonio Samaranch successively held the post of IOC vice-president, then until 1980 the post of ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary of Spain to the USSR and Mongolia.

Samaranch did everything possible so that Spain, which officially boycotted the Games in Moscow, brought here under the Olympic flag as many as five teams in team sports, becoming the second in the number of participating teams after the Soviet delegation. The nominal boycott will become the third curiosity in our political and historical attempt to analyze the future through the events of the past.

Moreover, the Olympics are still the most important sporting event of the 4-year period, and the USSR and Spain held an unofficial friendly football match in 1981. Moreover, veterans met when the teams were led out onto the field by Igor Netto and Francisco Gento, captains of the teams that were unable to play against each other in 1960. Franco died, and the axe of hostility that the countries had been waving for about forty years was buried in the ground.

Over the past three years, four countries have been lost, which are currently not hosting competitions

The events of recent years have consistently excluded not only Russia and Belarus from international sports, but also Ukraine and Israel, as hosts of international competitions. China was extremely dissatisfied with the previous leadership of the IOC and its relationship with the organization itself. It so happened that both Olympics that took place in Beijing caused serious negativity in the outside world. The 2008 Summer Olympics were held under the infuriating accompaniment of the Tibet theme, before the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Anglo-Saxon world started talking about the problems of the Xinjiang-Uyghur region. Neither of these could please the political leadership of China,

Plus a personal slap in the face with the disqualification for eight years of the sports icon of the Celestial Empire — swimmer Sun Yang. As a result, China is hosting international continental competitions, Asian Games, championships and Asian Cups in a streaming mode, but is in no hurry to hold anything on a global scale.

The current events in Turkey must be projected onto 2027, when the fourth European Games are scheduled to be held there. There are more and more competitions every year, and the practice of refusing to hold them is returning, as was the case with the same Denver in 1972. Here we also need to think: is the current practice of holding healthy and Paralympic starts at the same time a desire to draw attention to the latter, or is it the impending impossibility of holding inclusive starts separately? Therefore, now the new IOC president will have to think about the fact that it is time, according to the biblical covenants, to gather stones.