GENEVA — The world Kirsty Coventry walks into Monday as the International Olympic Committee's first female and first African president is already very different to the one she was elected in three months ago.
Take Los Angeles, host of the next Summer Games that is the public face and financial foundation of most Olympic sports.
The city described last week as a ''trash heap'' by U.S. President Donald Trump is preparing to welcome teams from more than 200 nations in July 2028.
Most of the 11,000 athletes and thousands more coaches and officials who will take part in the LA Olympics will have seen images of military being deployed against the wishes of city and state leaders.
A growing number of those athletes' home countries face being on a Trump-directed travel ban list — including Coventry's home Zimbabwe — though Olympic participants are promised exemptions to come to the U.S. Several players from Senegal's women's basketball team were denied visas for a training trip to the U.S., the country's prime minister said.
A first face-to-face meeting with Trump is a priority for the new IOC president, perhaps at a sports event.
Welcome to Olympic diplomacy, the outgoing IOC president Thomas Bach could reasonably comment to his political protégé Coventry.
The six Olympic Games of Bach's 12 years were rocked by Russian doping scandals and military aggression, Korean nuclear tensions, a global health crisis and corruption-fueled Brazilian chaos.