Oscar-winning actress Michelle Yeoh was among the eight new members elected by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) following a session meeting in Mumbai, India on Tuesday.
The 141st IOC session meeting in India’s financial capital saw four men and four women elected as new members, bringing the proportion of women on the IOC membership to 41.1 per cent.
The IOC said the move aligned with “its ambition to lead by example and increase female representation in governance structures”.
Yeoh, the first Asian actress to win an Oscar, is a former Malaysian junior squash champion.
Earlier this year, for her starring role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” movie, Yeoh won the Academy Award for Best Actress, becoming the first Asian to win the category, and the first Malaysian to win an Academy Award.
The Malaysian actress became famous in Hollywood when she was cast in 1997’s “Tomorrow Never Dies” James Bond film, playing a Chinese secret agent opposite Pierce Brosnan’s 007.
She also starred in the martial arts movie “Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon”, the 2005 period drama “Memoirs of a Geisha” and “Crazy Rich Asians”, the 2018 romantic comedy.
Yeoh is also an international campaigner for road safety in partnership with her husband, Jean Todt, the former president of the motorsports governing body FIA.
She is one of five new individual IOC members.
The others include Israel’s first Olympic medallist Yael Arad, Hungarian businessman and sports administrator Balazs Furjes, German sports entrepreneur Michael Mronz, and Cecilia Roxana Tait Villacorta, a former Olympic volleyball medallist and politician from Peru.
Sweden’s Petra Sorling, president of the International Table Tennis Federation, and South Korean Kim Jae-youl, president of the International Skating Union, joined through their roles as international federation heads. Mehrez Boussayene, president of the Tunisian Olympic Committee, also joined as an ex-officio member.
“These elections bring the total number of IOC Members to 107,” the IOC said.
The BBC reported that IOC president Thomas Bach said last month that the eight new proposed members were selected because of their “experience and diverse expertise in different walks of life”.
“What they all have in common is their love of sport and their strong belief in the Olympic values and what the IOC stands for,” Bach added.
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