The International Olympic Committee has unveiled the composition of the co-ordination commission for the 2022 Youth Olympic Games in Senegal, the first Olympic event to be held on the African continent.

The commission will be chaired by Zimbabwean former swimmer Kirsty Coventry (pictured, central), her country’s most successful Olympic athlete and now a senior sports official.

The 35-year-old Coventry is already a member of the IOC’s executive board, chair of the IOC athletes’ commission and a member of the IOC’s co-ordination commission for the Tokyo 2022 Olympics.

She is joined on the Senegal Youth Olympics co-ordination commission by fellow IOC members Paul Tergat of Kenya, Nawal El Moutawakel of Morocco, Gunilla Lindberg of Sweden and Li Lingwei of China, plus Andrew Ryan, the executive director of the Association of Summer Olympic International Federations, and Leandro Larossa, the chief executive of the 2018 games presently taking place in Buenos Aires.

Li has been the chair of the Buenos Aires 2018 co-ordination commission.

The co-ordination commissions represent stakeholders of the Olympic Movement, including athletes, national Olympic committees and international federations and, liaising with the local organising committee, monitor preparations for the games.

Coventry was recently appointed as Zimbabwe’s minister of sport, and also serves as a vice-president of the country’s NOC and of the International Surfing Association.

She retired as an athlete after the Rio 2016 Olympics – her fifth – having secured seven of the eight medals won by Zimbabweans in Olympic history.

Senegal’s hosting of the 2022 Youth Olympics was rubber-stamped at the IOC Session in Buenos Aires this week.

The games will be held in three cities – Dakar, the capital, the new city of Diamniadio, close to the capital, and the coastal resort of Saly – and a new 50,000-seat Olympic Stadium is to be built to host events.

The games are set to take place in May, in a bid to “greatly reduce the prevalence of tropical diseases,” according to Ugur Erdener, the IOC vice-president.

Erdener said that Senegal had been selected in preference to rival bids from Botswana, Nigeria and Tunisia (the IOC had earlier specified that the games would be held in Africa), thanks to a “booming economy” and better conditions.

Sportcal