IOC to take lead in gender eligibility criteria, says Coventry
LAUSANNE, Switzerland, June 26 (Reuters) - The International Olympic Committee will take the lead in discussions on gender eligibility criteria in sports, its new President Kirsty Coventry said on Thursday, four years after the ruling body had urged federations to handle the issue independently.
Coventry, who officially took over the presidency from Thomas Bach this week following Monday's ceremony in Lausanne as the first woman and first African to hold the position, said she now wanted the IOC to "protect the female category".
She said a working group would be set up to take charge of those discussions.
The IOC has long refused to apply any universal rule on transgender participation for the Games, instructing international federations in 2021 to come up with their own guidelines, so there is no one universal rule for sport.
"We're going to actually set up a working group made up of experts and international federations," Coventry told a press conference following the first executive board meeting of her presidency.
She had also held a two-day workshop for IOC members this week to discuss key issues with them.
"It was agreed by the members that the IOC should take a leading role in this and that we should be the ones to bring together the experts, bring together the international federations and ensure that we find consensus," Coventry said.
"We understand that there will be differences depending on the sports. We should make the effort to place emphasis on the protection of the female category and that we should ensure that this is done in consensus with all the stakeholders."
Transgender athletes are currently eligible to compete at the Olympics.
Some international federations have rules in place but others have not yet reached that stage.
U.S. President Donald Trump has banned transgender athletes from competing in sports in schools in the United States, which civil society groups say infringes on the rights of trans people.
Trump has said he would not allow transgender athletes to compete at the 2028 Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics.
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Here are four watches with associations to Formula One
Advertisement All current F1 sponsors are at the more luxury end, so for a more affordable brand you have to go back a bit. US brand Bulova sponsored the Benetton team in the 1980s, and still makes this handsome quartz powered racing chronograph. £379; Advertisement - Page continues below Rolex may have left F1, but sister brand Tudor is still there, sponsoring the Racing Bulls. Drivers will be seen in a blue dialled version of the ever popular Black Bay, which has an automatic movement and a 41mm matte black ceramic case. £4,510; You might like A racing mad Frenchman gave his name to a company that sells watches with an average price north of £100k. No sooner did Hamilton arrive at Ferrari, he was spotted wearing an ultra lightweight RM 67-02, an automatic watch that weighs just 32g. £POA; Advertisement - Page continues below TAG Heuer Formula One Chronograph TAG Heuer launched its first F1 line in the mid 1980s, nailing its motorsport colours firmly to the mast. The collection has grown in sophistication over the years, and this new chronograph has a 44mm sandblasted titanium case and an automatic movement with a 42 hour power reserve. Also water resistant to 200m. £4,300; See more on Watches
Times
32 minutes ago
- Times
Michael Gove on divorce, gay rumours, dating and the Camerons
Michael Gove has agreed to this interview nominally to plug his new podcast, which he says will be 'mischievous, right-wing, not always predictable' — core brand Gove — but we both know why I'm really here. His ex-wife, Sarah Vine, has just published her memoir, How Not to Be a Political Wife, garnering a gazillion column inches, and Gove wants either to brief his own version of events or surf the wash of her publicity wave. (Possibly both.) And, since I've already interviewed Vine at length, I now feel like a niche form of couples therapist — or Derek Batey, host of the Eighties game show Mr & Mrs. Gove is detained, so I sit for 20 minutes in his office at The Spectator taking in the bookish clutter, knackered furniture, depressing strip lights and a plastic fern in a pot. On his desk is a book of essays by Denis Healey — he's fascinated by the intellectual hinterland of Seventies politicians — and behind it is a silhouette of Churchill, the only thing he's unpacked. Although he became editor of the magazine last October, everything else, including a drinks cabinet of half-empty single malts, belonged to his predecessor, now a Times columnist, Fraser Nelson. Finally Gove, 57, materialises looking hassled, then is off again: 'So, so, so sorry, back in three minutes.' When he eventually settles beside me, looking slimmer than of late, he seems surprisingly nervous. Always articulate, 20 years in politics made him a fluent performer and navigator of interviewer bear traps, especially personal ones. But Vine's book has plunged his private self into public print and, although mainly warm and affectionate, she paints him as a prodigious drinker, social climber, absentee husband and distracted father tethered to the wheel of political ambition. Moreover, Gove must be wary that since I knew him and Vine (both former Times staff) until the mid 2010s, I've witnessed much of this for myself. So every Gove sentence is punctuated by loud, prolonged 'ahhhhhs' and 'ummmms' to buy time while he selects the precise (ie safest) word. Even so, he's incapable of dullness. When I suggest that as Spectator editor and the newly ennobled Lord Gove of Torry he has attained his final form, neither journalist nor politician but a synthesis of both, he says, 'I never expected really to be a peer, but I suppose it's a, ahhhh, sort of, ummm, capstone on a political career. It's a way of, ahhhhh, saying almost all the previous chapters have closed, but the story hasn't quite ended.' Then he adds, 'I don't know anything about golf, but being in the Lords is a bit like being a superannuated golf pro turning up to a pro-celeb tournament. Having played in the Open, now you're appearing with Russ Abbot.' I say I'm not sure how his noble friends will take that. 'Well, you know, it [the Lords] is a wonderful place, but the Commons …' Now on to the book, the Amazon status of which he's tracking so carefully — 'It's No 1 in political biographies!' — I feel he's worried it will steal the thunder of his own vaguely mooted memoir. Was it strange seeing his private life laid so bare? He says that given Vine, as a Daily Mail columnist, had already written so much about him, 'It's not quite out of a clear blue sky,' and in any case she has a right to her view: 'Sarah put up with a hell of a lot being married to me.' And while it was painful to recall upsetting moments, such as when the couple and their children were accosted on holiday in New York and told, 'Wankers like you shouldn't have kids,' none of it was 'a new shot through the heart'. Vine's thesis is that Gove strove to keep up with his far richer, posher fellow Tory modernisers, David Cameron and George Osborne, via affectations such as paying for his outer London house to have a more prestigious 0207 (ie central) phone number, learning how toffs pronounce 'Ascot' (ASS-cutt), and buying wine or cologne at fancy shops in St James's with royal warrants. Yet since in class terms David and Sam Cam never saw the parvenu Goves as equals, they were treated not as true friends but family retainers who, when no longer useful or biddable, could be coldly dispatched. • The Camerons froze me out too, but I didn't moan like Sarah Vine Although he won't explicitly contradict Vine's account — and reading her book pre-publication, he asked for no changes — he paints it as a rather broad brushstroke: 'I think the heuristic is an oversimplification of things, but it's not — what's the word? — untrue.' He claims no memory of the 0207 business, although says in London postcode terms, 'They [the Camerons] were the elves and we were the hobbits.' But his tastes were established 'before I ever got involved in politics, before I met David Cameron. And it's definitely the case that I gravitate towards, in terms of creature comforts, things that are establishment-coded. For example, you'd be more likely to find me in tweed than a denim jacket. Also, I like pedantry and … all the curious aspects of life in Britain and England.' As the adopted son of an Aberdeen fish merchant, he compares himself to Pip in Great Expectations, the lowly orphan who clambered up through society to become a gentleman. 'I think it's particularly a feature of having been adopted,' he says. 'I grew up in a house where there were books, but not many. My dad's favourite reading matter was Reader's Digest condensed books. My mum's was Catherine Cookson. I was spoddy, swotty, bookish from an early age, and so there was an element of being a cuckoo in the nest. And my sister — also adopted — is profoundly deaf. So there was a sense in my mind growing up that I had this intellect or curiosity that set me apart slightly from my family. Not in terms of feeling unloved — quite the opposite — but in terms of being slightly different as a sort of breed, you know? I had different interests, different characteristics.' (Of his biological family, whom he has never tried to trace to spare his adoptive parents pain, he will say only that it feels like an unanswered question.) Oxford contemporaries recall Gove wearing tweed suits bought in Oxfam for £1.50, already a young fogey. His politeness, self-deprecating wit and appetite for debate with those with whom he disagreed meant he was liked even by those on the left. Yet Gove had a strand of theatricality: he acted in plays, even a film, was a star debater, president of the Oxford Union and, before the term 'troll' was coined, wrote opinion pieces intended to provoke. Gove identifies with Alan Bennett, who chronicles the expanding gulf between himself and his working-class Leeds parents after he goes to Oxford. Gove's own family were proud their private-school scholarship son was entering a prestigious university, 'but, by definition, your interest in a variety of things creates a certain sort of distance. So for my dad, when he was alive, or for my mum now, having a drink would not involve a glass of wine. And drawing distinctions between bordeaux and burgundy would seem like a different life.' Fine wine, opera (especially Wagner), gambling at gentlemen's clubs and running with a fast, rich set who revelled in such pastimes were just, he says, things he enjoyed. If he were a truly determined social climber, he argues, wouldn't he feign other 'establishment-coded' passions for 'tennis, horse racing, property porn, which I have no interest in at all'? According to Vine, their inferior standing in Tory high command first became apparent when David Cameron moved Gove from education secretary to chief whip — a demotion and a pay cut to a job he hated — because Lynton Crosby's polling found his unpopularity with teachers an electoral drag. 'If anything,' Gove says, 'Sarah took it harder than I did at the time, although I definitely felt let down.' But while Vine smarted about a betrayal of friendship, Gove saw Cameron as 'a CEO saying, 'We've got to carry on making a profit and what you've been doing is not a profit centre, so I'm going to have to move you on. Otherwise the whole thing will sink. So, you know, suck it up.' ' Similarly, when Cameron decided to call the EU referendum he expected Gove to abandon his longstanding, deep-rooted Euroscepticism to support the PM's Remain position. 'His view was 'we' — as in the group of people in his leadership campaign, in modernising the Conservative Party — are a team and tribe, and the people who want us to leave the EU are the guys who generally got things wrong about how the Conservative Party needs to change. 'So you might agree with them on this issue, and it might be a really big issue, Michael, but these guys are only going to take the country and the Conservative Party back. So swallow your doubts on this. Just trust me and get with the programme.' ' But this time, Gove did not fall in line. What he regrets now, he says, is being 'insufficiently clear' to Cameron that he would campaign for Leave. 'Sarah is right,' he says, 'in that I often find it difficult — and I hope I find it easier now — when I disagree with someone and it's likely to be painful, to say what I really think.' He deferred telling Cameron his intention in the hope 'something would turn up to prevent an inevitable rupture'. Does he believe his friendship with Cameron was real, not merely political? 'Yes,' he says emphatically. But that friendship is over? 'Impaired, which is sort of a euphemism. Not the same, and I can completely understand why. He felt he'd earned the right, as the captain, to expect members of the team to recognise it was better for us all to hang together.' But Cameron, in his own memoir, accuses Gove of fundamental disloyalty, both over Brexit and for dramatically changing his mind about supporting Boris Johnson's 2016 leadership bid. Are you a disloyal person? 'No.' Do you still see Cameron? 'Infrequently, cordially. Remember we shared a cabinet table for a year. [When Cameron was Rishi Sunak's foreign secretary.] The last time I saw him was about three weeks ago, at a reception for the New Schools Network, and he couldn't have been nicer.' Gove admits his conflict-averse nature may surprise those who see him as 'a guy who crosses the road to have a fight … who can't see a controversy without joining on one side or the other'. But his distaste for shouty rows means he was ill suited either to be chief whip or (briefly and earlier) news editor at The Times. Vine, who is similarly anti-confrontational, depicts their marriage as quietly petering out rather than as a series of stormy battles. She describes how when they moved house in 2017, Gove totally disengaged, retreating to their bedroom to read, leaving his wife and mother-in-law to unpack. 'I think now I was depressed,' he says. (He'd just been sacked as justice secretary by Theresa May.) Nonetheless, it was pretty selfish. Has the book made him wish he'd done anything differently? 'Yes,' he says. 'Simply being more present. Being at home and with the family more, and then, when at home with the family, being there.' Not always distracted? 'Yes.' • Everything we've learnt from Sarah Vine's new book But isn't the truth that a ministerial career is simply more exciting than sitting at home with small children watching Peppa Pig? 'Politics is much more than a job — it's a crusade. You get involved in politics because things really matter. Now, people might say I'm deluded or that I got terrible things wrong. But you don't do it to pay the bills or because it's intellectually interesting — although it is. You're doing it to change things. So in my mind, a phone call unreturned, a submission unread, a speech unmade, a meeting postponed, were all opportunities to advance what we were doing. So if you're going to turn around how the country's prisons are run or change the school system, it's closer to being involved in a conflict than a job.' Vine and Gove's problem, he says, was lacking either extended family or a cushion of wealth to help them cope. Yet Cameron was famous for 'chillaxing', regular date nights, balancing his life. 'David was in that respect, as in so many, just a cut above,' Gove says, echoing the gushing terms in which Vine writes of Sam Cam. 'Better at politics, better at managing life. Most politicians don't have the degree of focus, self-discipline, consideration — the all in one package that David had. Whether I'm one of the worst, I don't know. But politics is littered with relationships that have undergone tremendous strain and gone wrong. And there will be different explanations for that — the male ego, the propensity of politicians to take risks, and other deformities that characterise people who are drawn into public life. But one of the things about David is that he's just a more effectively operating human being than most of us.' Gove makes government sound like dancing in The Red Shoes: passion turns into an unstoppable frenzy that ultimately destroys you. He lists the sundry pressures: the constant public scrutiny, so no MP 'can walk down the street and pick their nose'; the risk of a misspeak on breakfast TV, which 'for 24 hours — and it is only 24 hours — means you will be laughed at on social media'. Vine often notes Gove's heavy drinking, that he glugged half a bottle of whisky during the expenses scandal, was nearly sick on the Pope after a heavy night and (I've observed this at dinner myself) his unquenchable thirst for red wine. Vine told me she was once so concerned she sent him to the Mayr clinic in Austria, where he was told 'he has the liver of a baby'. Did he drink to combat stress? He swerves the question and says the reason he runs in the morning is because, 'Exercise clears mental space. I think for all sorts of people there will be different ways of coping — and I'm a Scot. But I'm not drinking at the moment.' (He does still smoke.) After the divorce in 2021, his life changed dramatically. While Vine lives with their daughter, Bea, 22, and son, Will, 20, both students, Gove moved initially to a grace and favour apartment for his own protection, since Ali Harbi Ali, the jihadist who murdered the Tory MP Sir David Amess, was found to have first stalked Gove as a potential target. Now he lives with Dr Lola Salem, 32, an Oxford lecturer in music and French. A trained opera singer who is, as a mutual friend puts it, 'even more combative and right-wing than Michael', she sounds like his perfect match. He says he'd rather be discreet about Salem. But, I say, you did snog her openly in J Sheekey fish restaurant. (A photo was passed on to the papers.) 'Manifestly,' he says. 'In my mind, the street is sniper's alley. But in a restaurant, you expect a certain amount of politeness.' Before meeting Salem at a Civic Future leadership conference, Gove tried the Bumble dating app. His experiences, he says, were fairly standard 'except for the aspect of being the notorious Michael Gove'. He had to prove to one woman it was really him by holding up a copy of that day's newspaper, hostage-style. He had a few pleasant dates without any mutual spark, but found the process 'fascinating … the pictures people choose, the descriptions they give themselves'. To the question, 'What does your online ad algorithm assume you are?' Gove replied, 'Loaded, but sadly that isn't true.' Before Vine, Gove had several serious girlfriends including the historian Amanda Foreman and Simone Kubes, now the Tory peer Baroness Finn. Even so, rumours still persist that Gove is a closeted gay man. Vine ascribes this to his many gay friends (he lived in Mayfair with the entrepreneur Ivan Massow and the former Tory MP Nick Boles) and his gay advisers, such as Henry Newman, plus his slightly camp taste for fripperies such as Geo F Trumper colognes. Gove adds, 'I also think people like the idea anyone in public life will have a kink or secret of some kind. So everyone from Peter Lilley to the current PM has had rumours spread about them. And this was one that latched onto me. I find it hilarious. But any protestation sounds like you're trying to cover something up.' Has he ever kissed a boy? 'No … except my son.' He seems happy to be outside politics, liberated from ministerial cars, using the Tube again, no longer walking with his head fixedly down. He goes into an excited reverie about the pleasures of people-watching, how amazed he is by the fashion dominance of 'athleisure wear'. Did he stand down as an MP last year because he knew when he lost Surrey Heath in the general election people would talk about 'staying up for Gove'? He admits 'that was at least one part of it', but he reckoned too that having angered over the years everyone from teachers to Boris fans he was an electoral liability. 'And also,' he says, 'I felt exhausted.' In the end, the Lib Dems won with a mighty 21 per cent swing. He says politicians rarely have legacies: 'Things are never static; there are never permanent victories.' He says he made his greatest mark in education, had a genuine zeal for reform as justice secretary, but there was too much unfinished business. He mentions how, after the Grenfell fire, he brought in the Building Safety Act. But of course, his one abiding legacy is Brexit. I ask if in 2016 he'd known how the next decade would play out, how exiting the EU would suck away so much energy from issues he cared about, whether he'd still have supported it. 'I don't know that I would have had the courage to say, 'Let's leave.' I hope I would have done.' But then he adds, more robustly, 'Some of the things which made me more pro-Brexit were the reactions to it. How the condescension towards people beforehand became more vivid and strident afterwards. 'These people didn't know what they were voting for,' or, 'Voting Leave is correlated with a lower level of education.' That only made me more pleased to have been on that side.' As for Brexit bonuses, he says, 'It's literally too soon to say. But the loudest predictions of ruin from the Remain side have certainly not come true, nor have the most extravagant predictions of benefits from Leavers.' Of his most notorious quote that 'people have had enough of experts', he says, 'I went through a period of actually thinking, 'Well, that isn't quite what I said. It's an inaccuracy. I want to try to make the case properly.' And now I think, 'That's fine. And do you know what? [His eyes gleam.] We have had enough of experts.' You're doubling down? 'Yes.' Whom do you mean by experts? 'People in organisations with three-letter acronyms. The IFS, CBI, IFP. And so on. Book-smart people who attempt to reduce the complexity of humanity to something that will fit into a PPE essay.' Can you imagine voting anything but Conservative? 'No. I used to, but now it's too late.' It's in your blood? 'Yes.' Never Reform? 'No.' I ask if he's back on speaking terms with Kemi Badenoch after having an affair with her friend, causing the break-up of a marriage. His eyes go saucer-wide and he won't comment. 'I am a huge fan of Kemi, but she's got a much more high-pressure job than me.' Do you think she's doing it well? 'Yes.' Isn't she too fighty to bring the electorate or even the Tory party with her? 'I think it's a good thing to be fighty.' He's fascinated by Blue Labour, got to know Lord Glasman during the referendum, has known Labour's campaign strategist Pat McFadden since the Nineties, when he worked for Donald Dewar, while Gove was a researcher on Scottish TV. 'I admire Morgan McSweeney. I very much admire Shabana Mahmood. I admire Wes Streeting. I don't dislike Keir Starmer at all; I just think he and Rachel Reeves have got themselves into an unnecessarily difficult situation … I'd say he's handled foreign affairs and defence better than I would have expected, and domestic politics worse.' Editing a political magazine must be fun, but doesn't he miss the power and tumult at the heart of government? 'This is a crap analogy, because I haven't been either, but it's a bit like I was a farmer and then I was called up. I served my time as a soldier and then, at the end of it, I was demobbed. Maybe it's the case that I will forever carry the PTSD from the trenches with me, but I'm now back on the farm. I really enjoy being a farmer, but there were experiences that were irreplaceable as a result of having been called up where we did things that needed to be done.' Then, as I am leaving, I note several shirts on the back of his office door. 'I need them to get changed into because I'm always spilling things down me,' Gove says. (He is noted for his lack of physical coordination.) But he does smell very nice. What is that fragrance, I ask, and he rushes to his briefcase to pull out a bottle of a Geo F Trumper cologne called Spanish Leather. 'I know!' Gove says. 'It's only going to fuel the gay rumours.' Quite Right, a new podcast from The Spectator, launches in September. Find out more at
The Guardian
37 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features
The Danish government is to clamp down on the creation and dissemination of AI-generated deepfakes by changing copyright law to ensure that everybody has the right to their own body, facial features and voice. The Danish government said on Thursday it would strengthen protection against digital imitations of people's identities with what it believes to be the first law of its kind in Europe. Having secured broad cross-party agreement, the department of culture plans to submit a proposal to amend the current law for consultation before the summer recess and then submit the amendment in the autumn. It defines a deepfake as a very realistic digital representation of a person, including their appearance and voice. The Danish culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, said he hoped the bill before parliament would send an 'unequivocal message' that everybody had the right to the way they looked and sounded. He told the Guardian: 'In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI.' He added: 'Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes and I'm not willing to accept that.' The move, which is believed to have the backing of nine in 10 MPs, comes amid rapidly developing AI technology that has made it easier than ever to create a convincing fake image, video or sound to mimic the features of another person. The changes to Danish copyright law will, once approved, theoretically give people in Denmark the right to demand that online platforms remove such content if it is shared without consent. It will also cover 'realistic, digitally generated imitations' of an artist's performance without consent. Violation of the proposed rules could result in compensation for those affected. The government said the new rules would not affect parodies and satire, which would still be permitted. Sign up to TechScape A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives after newsletter promotion 'Of course this is new ground we are breaking, and if the platforms are not complying with that, we are willing to take additional steps,' said Engel-Schmidt. Other European countries, he hopes, will follow Denmark's lead. He plans to use Denmark's forthcoming EU presidency to share its plans with his European counterparts. If tech platforms do not respond accordingly to the new law, they could be subject to 'severe fines', he said, and it could become a matter for the European Commission. 'That is why I believe the tech platforms will take this very seriously indeed,' he added.
