He died in Caracas. She was the first woman to join the International Olympic Committee.
By:
Agencies
–
–
At the age of 99, the eternal lady of Olympism, Flor Isava Fonseca, passed away this Saturday, July 25.
The Amazon was the first woman on the board of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). On this episode she commented: “When I was elected to the executive commission of the International Olympic Committee in 1990, it was an uproar, there were 11 men, it was unthinkable that a woman was going to be sitting there.”
Flor Isava’s death was known via social networks. “With deep pain, the Venezuelan Olympic Committee, its President Professor Eduardo Álvarez and its board of directors report the physical departure of Doña Flor Isava, who left an indelible mark on sports history as the first female IOC member.”
Flor Isava Fonseca was born in Cumaná on May 20, 1921.
From the VOC site we extract that he was educated in France and Belgium, where he studied piano, ballet, painting, literature, but the sport was always present in his life, and on his return to Venezuela in 1939 he devoted himself to playing tennis, horse riding and swimming, a discipline in which she became captain of the national team. “I am an intellectual lent to sport, which it forgot to return,” she used to say to explain her dissimilar interests.
In 1947, he founded the Venezuelan Federation of Equestrian Sports and shortly after it transcended the borders in terms of sports organization, by creating the Confraternity Cup of Amazonas, which brings the South American Equestrian Show to the entire region.
In 1965 she joined the Board of Directors of the Venezuelan Olympic Committee, and four years later, at the age of 48, she also began to play golf, a sport with which she would become the national runner-up for women’s doubles and mixed doubles.
Breaking down barriers
“Women only have one job in sport: crowning champions with garlands,” Baron Pierre De Coubertin, creator of the Modern Era Olympic Games, used to say, more to preserve the spirit of the joys of Antiquity than to machismo and discrimination.
Even so, women were only incorporated in the second edition, Paris 1900, with 22 competitors in five sports. One hundred years later, in Sydney 2000, female participation had only reached 38% of the more than 10,000 registered athletes. Between 1921 and 1934 the ladies had their own jousting, the Women’s Olympics.
Flor Isava Fonseca broke almost 100 years of male dominance in 1981, when together with the Finnish Pirjo Häggman, she was one of the first two women in history to be incorporated as IOC members, the select group of just over 100 leaders from around the world who chooses the Olympic venues and approves the competition programs and reforms to the Olympic Charter, among other powers of the Session of the International Olympic Committee in which they are integrated.
However, Häggman was forced to resign her position in 1999, due to the Salt Lake City scandal, when it was discovered that her husband had worked as a consultant to the city’s bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics, in whose choice she participated.
The Venezuelan leader, on the other hand, continued with a clean career. In 1990 she continued to break barriers, when she became the first woman in history to be elected to the IOC Executive Committee, where she remained for a period until 1994. She was later appointed Honorary IOC Member.
She was also the National Sports Commissioner, appointed by former President Carlos Andrés Pérez, created the Foundation that bears her name, to promote sport in the neighborhoods and towns of Venezuela, she planted the jails of sports clubs, responding to the call of a group of inmates who asked for his collaboration to that end, and founded the Flor Isava Library of the Venezuelan Olympic Committee, to which he donated his extensive collection of sports texts.
He received the Order of the Liberator, Knight of the Legion of Honor of the French Republic, Decoration of Civil Merit of Spain and the Olympic Order that the IOC delivers, among many other honors, but the greatest recognition will always be to remember that his work marked a before and after in the presence of women in Olympic sport.
At the Tokyo 2020 Games in the summer of 2021, the percentage of female participation will be 48.8%, very close to the perfect 50% that was achieved at the Buenos Aires 2018 Youth Games. In addition, the IOC has indicated that the 206 National Olympic Committees present in the Japanese capital must have at least one man and one woman in their delegation, and gave the option for countries to present two flag bearers, one of each gender.
As for the IOC members, almost a third of the current 102 are women (32 in total), an enormous advance if one takes into account that of the 42 honorariums (that made up the IOC Session in more remote times) only three are ladies.
Much of this progress reflects Flor Isava’s devotion to organizing sport in Venezuela, South America and the world, which the UN and the IOC recognized in 2016, when they named it the image of the campaign One victory leads to another, dedicated to promoting gender equality in sport through leadership training for young girls from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Reactions
