Olimpianos - Journal of Olympic Studies

Expectations from Kirsty Coventry's management as presidency of the International Olympic Committee

Rafael Carvalho da Silva Mocarzel, Georgios Stylianos Hatzidakis — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The election of Kirsty Coventry as the tenth president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) – the first woman and the first African person to hold the position – represents a moment of significant institutional change. While her rise is a symbolic victory for gender equity and diversity, this essay adopts a critical and prudent perspective, being qualitative and descriptive in nature, with the objective of contextualizing Coventry's trajectory and performing a document analysis of her candidate manifesto. Coventry's proposals are organized around five pillars: harnessing the power of sport, maximizing collaboration, strengthening partnerships for mutual growth, advocating for sustainable development, and promoting credibility and trust. The former candidate aims to empower athletes, International Federations (IFs), and National Olympic Committees (NOCs), advocating for adopting technologies like Artificial Intelligence and expanding to new media platforms. However, implementing these goals will be challenging. The main difficulty lies in reconciling the interests of a diverse global community, the redistribution of resources concentrated within the IOC, and maintaining neutrality in a polarized geopolitical landscape. Coventry’s presidency will therefore require the ability to navigate this complex ecosystem and translate the symbolism of her election into practical actions that ensure the Olympic Movement's relevance and sustainability.

The first ladies of brazilian olympic athletics, 1948–1984

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article presents emerging themes from the trajectory of a research project on the history of the first Brazilian female athletes to compete in Olympic track and field events. The research culminated in the exhibition “The First Ladies of Brazilian Olympic Athletics, 1948–1984”, held at the end of 2024 at the Centro Cultural Correios in Rio de Janeiro, which attracted more than 17,000 visitors. The development of the exhibition’s content and its curatorial approach addressed how, over ten editions of the Olympic Games, from 1948 to 1984, women gradually gained the right to compete in the same track and field events as men — with the women’s marathon being authorized only in Los Angeles in 1984. The objective of the research — to reconstruct and narrate the stories of the sixteen athletes who composed Brazil’s women’s Olympic athletics teams throughout this long period — was to give faces to these athletes and their achievements, while also recovering their struggles as women. The project sought to inspire new generations of athletes and to contribute scientifically through the visual documentation of uniforms, symbols, press coverage, and the key figures of this untold history. Iconographic research in newspapers and other bibliographical sources revealed how the erasure of these athletes gradually occurred: although they were nominally mentioned, they were almost always replaced by photographs of male athletes, and in several cases, their stories came close to disappearing entirely. The article illustrates these findings by presenting the stories of six of these athletes — the first female team to represent Brazil in Olympic athletics — who competed at the London Games in 1948, against the backdrop of major milestones in the history of women’s athletics worldwide.

Beyond passive neutrality: safeguarding the Olympic arena and rejecting collective sanctions

David Grassi — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This contribution, conceived as a corollary to previous analyses on the dynamics of exclusion and sports activism, explores the need to redefine the concept of political neutrality within the Olympic Movement. The central question is how the International Olympic Committee can reconcile its institutional stance against human rights violations with the vital need to preserve the integrity and inclusivity of the Games. Through a re-reading of Rule 50 and the observation of recent dissent, it is argued that the ban on propaganda on the field is not censorship, but a safeguard for athletes and the neutrality of the arena. Concurrently, the prolonged exclusion of Russian and Belarusian athletes is examined as an inequitable collective sanction that borrows from the logic of political isolation. While the shift to an “active and functional neutrality” paves the way forward, the task for the future is to consolidate this paradigm through clear operational criteria. This article proposes such criteria to ensure the universal application of regulations in view of future Olympic cycles, starting with Los Angeles 2028.