Incoming IOC president to open talks on Russia’s potential return to Olympics

Published

6 months ago

March 21, 2025

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The incoming IOC president has revealed to Sky News she is against banning countries from the Olympics over wars and will open talks on Russia’s potential return to the Games.

Only Russians competing as neutrals were allowed to take part in Paris 2024 as Moscow was punished for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Kirsty Coventry will be the first female president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its first African leader.

The former Olympic swimmer, who won two gold medals for Zimbabwe, has said she sees inconsistencies in the current approach of singling out Russia while there are conflicts on her own continent.

Asked a day after her election if she was against banning countries from the Olympics over conflicts, Ms Coventry told Sky News: “I am, but I think you have to take each situation into account.

“What I would like to do is set up a taskforce where this taskforce tries to set out some policies and some guiding frameworks that we as the movement can use to make decisions when we are brought into conflicts.

“We have conflicts in Africa and they’re horrific at the moment. So this is not going away, sadly.

“So how are we going to protect and support athletes?

“How are we going to ensure that all athletes have the opportunity to come to the Olympic Games?

“And our responsibility is also to ensure once those athletes are all there, that they’re safe and that we protect and support them during the Olympic Games.

“So there’s a fine balance. But ultimately I believe that it’s best for our movement to ensure that we have all athletes represented.”

Analysis:
New IOC president will have to deal with Trump, Putin and transgender issue

US President Donald Trump has also apparently discussed with Russian leader Vladimir Putin the idea of using sports to heal relations with Russia.

While the next Summer Olympics are not until 2028 in Los Angeles, there are fewer than 11 months until the Winter Games in Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo.

So will Russia be back by then?

“We’re going to have that discussion with a collective group …with the taskforce,” she said.

Gender eligibility

This interview was taking place a day after her election to the highest job in sport – seeing off six rivals, including Sebastian Coe.

World Athletics – led by Lord Coe – has been exploring whether to introduce swab tests to assess gender eligibility.

A key athletics meeting next week is due to discuss the issue amid concerns about fairness over athletes with differences of sex development and transgender women competing in women’s sport.

The IOC has previously called a return to sex testing a “bad idea”, but Ms Coventry is not ruling it out as she has talked about protecting the female category.

“This is a conversation that’s happened and the international federations have taken a far greater lead in this conversation,” she said.

“What I was proposing is to bring a group together with the international federations and really understand each sport is slightly different.

“We know in equestrian, sex is really not an issue, but in other sports it is.

“So what I’d like to do again is bring the international federations together and sit down and try and come up with a collective way forward for all of us to move.”

Future Olympic hosts

Looking ahead there are the 2036 Olympics to be awarded.

And Ms Coventry pledged IOC members will get more of a say after behind-the-scenes deals under Thomas Bach seeing Paris (2024), LA (2028) and Brisbane (2034) uncontested decisions.

The IOC presidential campaign has raised when Africa and the Middle East will host the Olympics for the first time, as well as potential interest from India to host the Games in 2036.

“There’s a few slight adjustments that I’d like to make in terms of involvement of the IOC members – that was something very clearly related to me in this campaign,” Ms Coventry said.

“But new regions and embracing new regions … will be a part of what I would like to see.

“I think if we can embrace new regions across the entire movement, it opens this up for so many different opportunities, including revenue growth, including being able to reach new audiences.”

Zimbabwe rights concerns

There has been scrutiny over Ms Coventry’s role in Zimbabwe’s government as sports minister given concerns – raised by the UK government – about whether the country is violating human rights and clamping down on political freedoms.

“I have always been a very proud Zimbabwean and when I was asked to step into this role (as a minister in 2018), I took time to really consider it,” she said.

“I knew that it would come with different thoughts and feelings, but I wanted to try and create change in my country. I wanted to try and make things better for athletes in my country and we’re doing that.

“We’re working on strengthening pieces of legislation that have never been there before. And these are things that I don’t believe I would have been able to achieve on the outside.”

IOC agenda

Ms Coventry officially starts in June as the first female IOC president.

“It shows that we are moving and we’re changing and we’re global and we’re diverse and we represent everybody,” she said.

And how will her presidency be judged a success? The rules allow her to serve until 2037 if she is re-elected for a final four-year term after being given an initial eight-year mandate.

She said: “I want to ensure that we can find these young, talented athletes from around the world and we can give them an opportunity to be identified and to have training and be connected to the best coaches in the world and that’s all going to be driven by embracing technology.

“And I think that is going to be really a game changer in the next few years.”

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With one of his proudest achievements on the line, will Trump force Netanyahu’s hand?

Published

6 hours ago

September 23, 2025

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With one of his proudest achievements on the line, will Trump force Netanyahu's hand?

The moment could have felt so different. It should have felt so different.

It was supposed to come a long time ago, and it was supposed to be the outcome of a peace process, of reconciliation, of understanding, of coexistence and of healing.

If it had happened the right way, then we’d be celebrating two states living alongside each other, coexisting, sharing a capital city.

As it happened: France recognises Palestinian state

Instead, the recognition of Palestine as a state comes out of the rubble of Gaza.

It has come as a last-ditch effort to save all vanishing chances of a Palestinian state.

Essentially, the countries which have recognised Palestine here at the UN in New York are jumping to the endpoint and hope to now fill in the gaps.

Those gaps are huge.

Even before the horror of the Hamas attack on 7 October 2023, there was almost no realistic prospect of a two-state solution.

Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank and Benjamin Netanyahu’s divide-and-conquer strategy for the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza had made reconciliation increasingly hard.

The Hamas attack set back what little hope there was even further, while settlement expansion by the Israelis in the West Bank accelerated since then.

The same questions which have made all this so intractable remain.

How to share a capital city? Who controls Jerusalem’s Old City, where the holy sites are located? If it’s shared, then how?

What happens to the settlements in the West Bank? If land swaps take place, then where? What happens to Gaza? Who governs the Palestinians?

And how are the moderates on both sides emboldened to dominate the discourse and the policy?

Hope rests with Trump

Right now, Palestinian extremism is holding out in Gaza with the hostages, and Israeli extremism is dominant on the other side, with Netanyahu now threatening to fully annex the West Bank as a reaction to the recognition declarations at the UN.

It all feels pretty bleak and desperate. If there is cause for some hope, it rests with Donald Trump.

Over the next 24 hours in New York, he will meet key Arab and Muslim leaders from the Middle East and Asia to present his latest plan for peace in Gaza.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia, and Pakistan will all participate in the meeting.

They will listen to his plan, some may offer peacekeeping troops (a significant development if they do), some may offer to provide funding to rebuild the strip and, crucially, all are likely to tell him that his Abraham Accords plan – to forge ahead with diplomatic normalisation between Muslim nations and Israel – will not happen if Israel pushes ahead with any West Bank annexation.

Netanyahu will address the UN at the end of the week, before travelling to the White House on Monday, where he will tell Trump what he plans to do next in both Gaza and the West Bank.

If Trump wants his Abraham Accords to expand and not collapse – and remember the accords represent a genuine diplomatic game changer for the region, one Trump is rightly proud of – then he will force Netanyahu to stop in Gaza and stop in the West Bank.

He is the only man in the world who can.

World

Israel is increasingly ostracised – and no matter how strong its army, it’s not a good place to be

Published

8 hours ago

September 23, 2025

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Israel is increasingly ostracised - and no matter how strong its army, it's not a good place to be

Emmanuel Macron was in his element. Touring the UN’s main hall, hugging fellow leaders before taking to the podium.

He was here to make history. France, the country that carved up the Middle East over a hundred years ago along with Britain, finally giving the Palestinians what they believe is long overdue.

As it happened: France recognises Palestinian state

Yvette Cooper witnessed the event looking on. Her prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, did the same over the weekend. Foregoing such hallowed surroundings, he beat the French to it by a day.

“Peace is much more demanding, much more difficult than all wars,” said Macron, “but the time has come.”

There were cheers as he recognised the state of Palestine.

The time for what? Not for peace that is for sure. The war in Gaza rages and the West Bank simmers with settler violence against Palestinians.

The French and British believe Israel is actively working against the possibility of a Palestinian state. Attacks on Palestinians, land seizures, the relentless pace of settlement construction is finishing off the chances of a two-state solution to the conflict, so time for unilateral action they believe.

Without the horizon of a state of their own, Palestinians will resort to more and more extreme means.

The Israelis say they have already done so on 7 October and this move only rewards the wicked extremism of Hamas.

But the Netanyahu government has undeniably sought to divide and weaken the Palestinians and has always opposed a Palestinian state.

Israel still has the support of Donald Trump, but opinion polls suggest even in America public sentiment is moving against them. That shift will be hard to reverse.

More than three quarters of the UN’s member nations now recognise a state of Palestine, four out of five of the security council’s permanent members.

The move is hugely problematic. Where exactly is the state, what are its borders, will it now be held to account for its extremists, who exactly is its government?

But more and more countries believe it had to happen. That leaves Israel increasingly ostracised and for a small country in a difficult neighbourhood that is not a good place to be, however strong it is militarily.

World

China to evacuate 400,000 after ‘super’ typhoon hits Philippines and Taiwan

Published

15 hours ago

September 22, 2025

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China to evacuate 400,000 after 'super' typhoon hits Philippines and Taiwan

China will evacuate 400,000 people over a super typhoon that slammed into the Philippines and Taiwan today.

Super Typhoon Ragasa, which is heading to southeastern China, has sustained winds of 134mph.

Thousands of people have already been evacuated from homes and schools in the Philippines and Taiwan, with hundreds of thousands more to leave their homes in China.

Filipino forecasters said it slammed into Panuitan Island off Cagayan province with gusts of up to 183mph on Monday.

More than 8,200 were evacuated to safety in Cagayan while 1,220 fled to emergency shelters in Apayao, which is prone to flash floods and landslides.

Domestic flights were suspended in northern provinces hit by the typhoon, and fishing boats and inter-island ferries were prohibited from leaving ports over rough seas.

In Taiwan’s southern Taitung and Pingtung counties, closures were ordered in some coastal and mountainous areas along with the Orchid and Green islands.

Officials in southern Chinese tech hub, Shenzhen, said they planned to relocate around 400,000 people including people in low-lying and flood-prone areas.

Shenzhen’s airport added it will halt flights from Tuesday night.

In Fujian province, on China’s southeast coast, 50 ferry routes were suspended.

According to China’s National Meteorological Centre, the typhoon will make landfall in the coastal area between Shenzhen city and Xuwen county in Guangdong province on Wednesday.

A tropical cyclone with sustained winds of 115mph or higher is categorised in the Philippines as a super typhoon.

The term was adopted years ago to demonstrate the urgency tied to extreme weather disturbances.

Ragasa was heading west and was forecast to remain in the South China Sea until at least Wednesday while passing south of Taiwan and Hong Kong, before landfall on the China mainland.

The Philippines’ weather agency warned there was “a high risk of life-threatening storm surge with peak heights exceeding three metres within the next 24 hours over the low-lying or exposed coastal localities” of the northern provinces of Cagayan, Batanes, Ilocos Norte and Ilocos Sur.

Power was cut out on Calayan island and in the entire northern mountain province of Apayao, west of Cagayan, disaster officials said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties from Ragasa, which is known locally in the Philippines as Nando.

On Monday, Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos Jr suspended government work and all classes on Monday in the capital, Manila, and 29 provinces in the main northern Luzon region.