Latest news with #InternationalOlympicCommittee
National Post
10 hours ago
- Politics
- National Post
‘ENSURE FAIRNESS': Olympics chief announces ‘scientific approach' to ‘protect female category'
The new president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) addressed the subject of transgender athletes competing in women's sports, and revealed there is 'overwhelming support' by IOC members to 'protect the female category.' Article content Kirsty Coventry, who was in Lausanne, Switzerland, chairing her first meetings this week since becoming chief, said that a taskforce of scientists and international federations would be created in the coming weeks to come up with a new policy. Article content Article content Article content 'We understand that there'll be differences depending on the sport,' she said, according to Fox News. Article content 'But it was fully agreed that as members that, as the IOC, we should make the effort to place emphasis on the protection of the female category.' Article content Coventry continued: 'It was very clear from the members that we have to protect the female category, first and foremost. We have to do that to ensure fairness. And we have to do it with a scientific approach. And with the inclusion of the international federations who have done a lot of work in that area.' Article content The new policy is expected to ban trans athletes from competing in the female category. Article content Article content But Coventry, who won seven Olympic medal when she competed for Zimbabwe, noted that the shift in policy would not affect previous Olympics results. Article content 'We are not going to be doing anything retrospectively. We are going to be looking forward,' Coventry said. Article content The update comes after the controversial boxing tournament at the 2024 Paris Games after two athletes — Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting — won gold medals despite having been disqualified from the previous year's World Championships for allegedly failing to meet gender eligibility criteria. Article content Article content World Boxing, which is now recognized by the IOC as the sport's international federation, has since introduced mandatory sex testing and said Khelif would not be able to compete in the female category until she undergoes the test. Article content Khelif has always maintained she was born a woman, competes as a woman, and is a woman. Article content 'It was very clear from the membership the discussion around this has to be done with medical and scientific research at the core, so we are looking at the facts and the nuances and the inclusion of the international federations that have done so much of this work,' Coventry said. Article content
Toronto Sun
10 hours ago
- Politics
- Toronto Sun
‘ENSURE FAIRNESS': Olympics chief announces ‘scientific approach' to ‘protect female category'
International Olympic Committee (IOC) new president Kirsty Coventry delivers her speech during the handover ceremony at the Olympic House in Lausanne, Switzerland, on June 23, 2025. Photo by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP / Getty Images The new president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) addressed the subject of transgender athletes competing in women's sports, and revealed there is 'overwhelming support' by IOC members to 'protect the female category.' This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Kirsty Coventry, who was in Lausanne, Switzerland, chairing her first meetings this week since becoming chief, said that a taskforce of scientists and international federations would be created in the coming weeks to come up with a new policy. 'We understand that there'll be differences depending on the sport,' she said, according to Fox News . 'But it was fully agreed that as members that, as the IOC, we should make the effort to place emphasis on the protection of the female category.' Coventry continued: 'It was very clear from the members that we have to protect the female category, first and foremost. We have to do that to ensure fairness. And we have to do it with a scientific approach. And with the inclusion of the international federations who have done a lot of work in that area.' Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The new policy is expected to ban trans athletes from competing in the female category. RECOMMENDED VIDEO But Coventry, who won seven Olympic medal when she competed for Zimbabwe, noted that the shift in policy would not affect previous Olympics results. 'We are not going to be doing anything retrospectively. We are going to be looking forward,' Coventry said. The update comes after the controversial boxing tournament at the 2024 Paris Games after two athletes — Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-Ting — won gold medals despite having been disqualified from the previous year's World Championships for allegedly failing to meet gender eligibility criteria. Algeria's Imane Khalif (left) fights against Tunisia's Homrani Ep Zayani Mariem (Blue) during the women's Fly finals at the Dakar arena in 2020. (Getty Images) Photo by Getty Images / Getty Images World Boxing, which is now recognized by the IOC as the sport's international federation, has since introduced mandatory sex testing and said Khelif would not be able to compete in the female category until she undergoes the test. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Khelif has always maintained she was born a woman, competes as a woman, and is a woman. Read More 'It was very clear from the membership the discussion around this has to be done with medical and scientific research at the core, so we are looking at the facts and the nuances and the inclusion of the international federations that have done so much of this work,' Coventry said. 'But it was pretty much unanimously felt that the IOC should take a leading role in bringing everyone together to try and find a broad consensus.' Toronto Maple Leafs Toronto Raptors Toronto Raptors Music News
USA Today
17 hours ago
- Politics
- USA Today
Add Olympics to list of places transgender people not welcome
The days of transgender athletes being able to compete at the Olympics are numbered. The International Olympic Committee will no doubt dispute that, arguing that new president Kirsty Coventry's announcement Thursday was only for a working group to examine how to 'protect the female category.' But from her loaded language to the dearth of transgender athletes at the Games, it's obvious this is intended as a means to exclude, not include. 'A lot of members shared with us their own experiences from their own countries that had nothing to do with Paris or any other specific sporting event. Just their cultural experiences they were sharing with us and culturally what was expected from us as an Olympic movement,' Coventry said. 'That made it very clear that we had to do something, and this was what everyone agreed was the way forward.' Make no mistake: That 'way forward' will take the IOC backward. And do so in contradiction of its own research and at great harm to an already vulnerable community. For the better part of 20 years, beginning with the 2004 Athens Olympics, transgender athletes were allowed to compete with minimal, if any, fuss. During that time, in fact, there was only one — one! — openly transgender woman who competed, weightlifter Laurel Hubbard in Tokyo. (Two nonbinary athletes have also competed.) But transgender women athletes have become an obsession for some folks with deep pockets and big platforms, and their disinformation campaign has now poisoned the discourse for the larger public. Most of us don't know anyone who is transgender, let alone a transgender athlete. Which ought to tell you how big a 'threat' they are. But J.K. Rowling, Riley Gaines and the U.S. Republican Party have managed to convince even people who should know better that transgender women have both a competitive advantage and are a marauding horde about to overwhelm women's sports. The anecdotal evidence shows that to be patently false. There are 'less than 10' transgender men and women out of the half-million athletes competing in the NCAA, according to president Charlie Baker, and probably another 100 or so at the youth level. Hubbard, the lone transgender woman to compete openly at a Games, got knocked out in the opening round of the weightlifting competition in 2021. Even Lia Thomas, whose one NCAA title has been made into a sign of the apocalypse, lags well behind when compared with Olympic-level swimmers like Katie Ledecky and Kate Douglass. Know what else shows this hysteria over transgender athletes to be overblown? A study the IOC funded! Transgender women might actually be at a disadvantage compared to cisgender women, researchers found, with lower lung function and cardiovascular fitness. 'While longitudinal transitioning studies of transgender athletes are urgently needed, these results should caution against precautionary bans and sport eligibility exclusions that are not based on sport-specific (or sport-relevant) research,' the researchers wrote. But ignorance, fear and hate are powerful motivators, so here we are. 'It was very clear from the members that we have to protect the female category, first and foremost,' Coventry said. 'We have to do that to ensure fairness, but we need to do that with a scientific approach. And with the inclusion of the international (sport) federations. 'We need to bring in the experts, that will take in a little bit of time. We need to bring in the (sport federations) so we have full buy-in to try and come up with cohesion on this specific topic.' Coventry is naïve if she thinks there will ever be cohesion on this. The people howling for 'fairness' will accept nothing less than the complete exclusion of transgender women, from sports and in society. That is awful enough. But if you think this won't harm all women, you must have missed the debacle in boxing at the Paris Olympics. For those who missed it in biology class, gender is not black and white. There are women with three X chromosomes. There are women missing one of the X chromosomes. There are women who have XY chromosomes but female reproductive systems. There are women who have naturally higher levels of testosterone and androgen. There also are women who have external female genitalia and internal male reproductive organs — some of whom might not even know it! Then there are the disingenuous folks who already have and will continue to use a white, heteronormative notion of what a woman is to remove anyone who falls outside it. A female athlete who is masculine presenting and has short hair? She'd better be ready to prove her womanhood. It's demeaning, it's humiliating and it's wholly unnecessary. Even track and field's solution of using cheek swabs to weed out those who aren't woman enough to meet their criteria is a form of discrimination, a requirement male athletes aren't subjected to. This transgender paranoia is just that, paranoia. Might a transgender athlete wind up on a podium some day? Sure. Just as will a woman whose parents are millionaires and could afford to give her the best in private coaching, strength training and nutrition from the time she could walk. Or a woman who has an inordinately long wingspan and superior lung capacity. But we don't tar and feather those women. We celebrate them. The beauty of sports, the whole purpose of the Olympics, is for athletes to test themselves, mentally and physically. To strive for the best versions of themselves while also learning valuable life lessons about commitment, resilience and cooperation. Yet the IOC appears ready to join the chorus of those who want to make those opportunities off-limits to transgender people, simply because of who they are. 'It was very clear from the membership that the discussion around this has to be done with scientific approaches and scientific and medical research at the core so that we are looking at the facts and the nuances,' Coventry said. The facts and the nuances are that the IOC already had protocols for transgender participation and they worked just fine for two decades. But that was never going to be good enough for the braying mob, and Coventry and the IOC appear to have decided that sacrificing transgender athletes is a small price to pay for making that headache go away. Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.
Axios
20 hours ago
- Sport
- Axios
Exclusive: Olympics have big AI plans
The Olympics has a bold plan to use AI to make upcoming games in Italy and Los Angeles more efficient and to improve the experience for those watching on TV around the world. Why it matters: As one of the most watched and lucrative global events, the games have long served as a testbed for new technologies. The big picture: Ahead of last year's Paris Games, the International Olympic Committee unveiled a broad framework for AI use, to help in athlete training and event judging as well as to improve fans' experiences. However, AI played only a supporting role in Paris, with partners and sponsors using the event to showcase their chatbots and other technology. For next February's Winter Games in Italy, organizers hope AI can help streamline the time-consuming contingency planning and scheduling that comes with unpredictable snow conditions. For the L.A. Summer Games in 2028, the organizers hope AI will help manage more than three dozen sports taking place across a broad swath of Southern California (plus softball and canoeing in Oklahoma City). "For me, it is, 'How can we actually use AI to help the operations of the games globally?' Olympics CIO and CTO Ilario Corna told Axios in an interview. Zoom in: When it comes to the broadcasting of the games, AI is already speeding access to highlights from as many angles and athletes as possible, Olympic Broadcasting Services CEO Yiannis Exarchos told Axios. In Paris, OBS produced 11,000 hours of content, Exarchos said, with AI broadening the coverage and getting it to viewers faster. Using AI allowed those hours of footage to be sliced and diced into 97,000 separate highlight clips, in addition to the full coverage of each event. Not only could viewers choose to focus on a particular athlete in a particular sport, but broadcasters could create clips in different formats, such as horizontal video for social media. That's important to broadcasters around the world who spent millions or even billions to broadcast the games in their country. "It gave them the opportunity to be constantly pushing very, very fast, customized highlights for their own audience, on social, on digital, on their programs," Exarchos said. The use of technology was particularly noticeable with TV replays that made use of multiple cameras to show athletes in 3-D motion from multiple angles. As recently as a few years ago, it took around 20 minutes to generate a single such replay. "This made it practically useless for the live director," Exarchos said. With advances in AI and other technology, OBS was able to bring the creation of those highlights down to a matter of seconds, making it useful in live coverage. Viewers end up with a better understanding of an event's dynamics — whether it's a diver's moves, the spin on a ping-pong ball or the path of an archer's arrows. "But what I keep on insisting and reminding ourselves, starting with myself, is that this is not about technology," Exarchos said. "It's about using technology to tell the stories of the greatest athletes in the world." Between the lines: One reason the Olympics are able to push tech's boundaries is that they took the production of the raw videos for each sport in house in the 2000s with the creation of Olympic Broadcasting Services, which then distributes them to networks like NBC who've bought the rights. When each round of games had a different broadcaster in charge, they had to start from scratch each time. AI also has a role helping athletes and their coaches better understand their performances. In Paris, Alibaba and Omega partnered to help understand what's happening during hurdles races, not just in terms of the outcome, but also by tracking athletes' steps between each hurdle and other metrics useful in training. Corna said he'd like to see such practices spread to far more sports. Another job for AI could come in helping reduce the environmental impact of the games. In Paris, organizers used AI to help monitor energy use — spotting, for example, when one stadium left its lights on overnight and shutting them off. Using so-called digital twins of various stadiums and other venues cut down on the number of in-person visits by officials ahead of last summer's Olympics. In another case, AI helped identify a broken motor on a remote camera near the Eiffel Tower whose view kept unexpectedly drifting from its intended spot. Yes, but: One of the big challenges is ensuring that new technologies don't unduly benefit the richest countries.
New York Post
21 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Post
New Olympics chief calls for ‘protecting' women's category amid global trans athlete wave
The new president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Kirsty Coventry, addressed the topic of transgender athletes competing in women's sports at her first official news conference since taking over on Thursday, and said that there is 'overwhelming support' by IOC members to protect the female category. 'We understand that there'll be differences depending on the sport … but it was very clear from the members that we have to protect the female category, first and foremost to ensure fairness,' Coventry said. 'But we need to do that with a scientific approach and the inclusion of the international federations who have already done a lot of work in this area.' The new president added that there is 'unanimous' support for coming to an agreement about how to amend the policy, and suggested the IOC may take inspiration from the World Athletics policy, which restricts biological males from competing in women's sports if those males have gone through male puberty. 'It was very clear from the membership the discussion around this has to be done with medical and scientific research at the core, so we are looking at the facts and the nuances and the inclusion of the international federations that have done so much of this work … having a seat at table and sharing with us because every sport is different,' she said. 3 Newly elected President of the International Olympic Committee Kirsty Coventry speaks at a meeting at the Olympic House in Lausanne, Switzerland on June 25, 2025. REUTERS 3 Algerian boxer Imane Khelif stands in the ring after defeating Italy's Angela Carini in the women's 66kg preliminary boxing match during the Paris Olympics on Aug. 1, 2024. AP 'But it was pretty much unanimously felt that the IOC should take a leading role in bringing everyone together to try and find a broad consensus.' However, Coventry also said any changes likely wouldn't result in retroactively changing the results of past competitions that featured athletes with gender-eligibility questions. The 2024 Paris Olympics featured two boxers winning gold in women's competition, despite previously failing gender-eligibility tests for international competitions. 'We're not going to be doing anything retrospectively. We're going to be looking forward. From the members [it] was 'What are we learning from the past, and how are we going to leverage that and move that forward to the future?'' Coventry said. Last year, the United Nations released study findings that say nearly 900 biological females have fallen short of the podium because they have been beaten out by transgender athletes. 3 The LA28 and IOC executive boards attend a press conference for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games at the LA Convention Center in Los Angeles on June 5, 2025. AFP via Getty Images The study, titled 'Violence against women and girls in sports,' said that more than 600 athletes did not medal in more than 400 competitions in 29 different sports, totaling over 890 medals, according to information obtained up to March 30. 'The replacement of the female sports category with a mixed-sex category has resulted in an increasing number of female athletes losing opportunities, including medals, when competing against males,' the report said.
