Swim champ wants to be IOC's first woman chief

Inspiration travels over 7,000km, across continents and water bodies, through a television set and into the excited heart of a nine-year-old girl. It's a summer of Olympic swimming in Barcelona in 1992 and in Harare, Zimbabwe, the girl watches and turns to her parents.

- Rohit Brijnath

"I'm going to go to the Olympic Games and I'm going to win Zimbabwe a gold medal."

They don't shush her, but support her. "I was a very competitive little girl," says the 41-year-old woman now. "Most of the time I would go wake them up to take me to morning practice."

In 2000, she got to the Games. In 2004, she won her first swimming gold. By 2008 her haul totalled two golds, four silvers and one bronze, but her experience was richer than medals. It was watching Muhammad Ali getting mobbed at the Olympic Village in 2000 and thinking, "Wow, this is something special, this movement".

It was landing in Zimbabwe in 2004 and the plane inching to the gate because of the enthusiasm of the welcome home party. "To see how sport just brought everyone together, all Zimbabweans, (and) that was a very divisive time in our history... And to think that was my nine-year-old dream that had helped do that".

And so this is partly why Kirsty Coventry is running for the most scrutinised job in sport: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) president (voting is on March 20). Because this "transformative" power of sport, its dismantling of barriers, it's not a theory for her, it's a truth.

"I've lived it," says the minister of sport, recreation, arts and culture in a video call from Harare.