At the meeting on Wednesday 5 April the Guest Speaker was James Tomkins OAM, OLY, Olympic Rower and member of the famous "Awesome Foursome" Olympic Rowing team, speaking on the topic 'Doing the right thing in sport is sometimes hard and sometimes easy'.
Our lunch meeting at No 35, Sofitel on Collins was the 35th for the 2022-23 Rotary year.
President Adrian also noted the three members celebrating their member anniversary on the day.
David Kram and Bev Brock celebrated 17 years and Alistair Urquhart 23 years and an omission from last Wednesday Rosemary Nixon 6 years.
David’s service to Rotary was highlighted particularly his service via the Arts and the Arts committee.
James spoke about some of the challenges he has faced in his Olympic career Firstly about the new sports that have recently come into the Olympics, secondly about dealing with bans on countries and athletes and thirdly about the issues relating to transgender competitors in sports.
He spoke about how decisions around new categories revolve around the ability of new sports to generate funds via sponsorships and broadcasting rights to support both counties and other sports that don’t have the capacity to generate revenue. Also the interest that new sports creates particularly for young people influences decisions on this.
On the issue of penalizing athletes for the decisions of their Governments this is a very difficult issue to manage. The games are designed to bring nations and religions together to support peaceful interaction of all countries without being influenced by geo politics.
With the increased diversity of gender identification the issue is how to create a level playing field for all sports. The IOC has decided that each sport should be the judge of how this issue should be managed. Skill based sports do not have the same issue as strength based sports and the greater change in gender and physical development makes this a very difficult area to make good decisions.
In summary making good decisions and right decisions is not always apparent at first glance but it has been very interesting and challenging in being involved in this for the IOC during his eight year term.
