Pau Gasol to rep athletes on IOC board via L.A. Games

MILAN — Two-time NBA champion Pau Gasol was picked by Olympic athletes Friday to characterize them on the IOC government board via the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Games.

Gasol received his NBA titles within the metropolis with the Lakers and has been a member of a key Olympic panel overseeing the Games since he was elected by athletes as an International Olympic Committee member on the Tokyo Summer Games in 2021.

His No. 16 jersey is retired and hangs within the Lakers’ residence enviornment that can host gymnastics and boxing on the Games. He was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2023.

Gasol’s rise in Olympic politics to affix the influential 15-member IOC board got here at a gathering of the governing physique’s athletes fee.

“This is a big moment to be able to take on the responsibility of leading our commission,” he stated in an announcement revealed by the IOC.

Gasol is a five-time Olympian, serving to Spain win silver medals in males’s basketball on the 2008 Beijing Summer Games and London in 2012 and bronze in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

He is the primary male athlete to take the IOC board seat in 14 years. He follows ice hockey gamers Emma Terho of Finland and Angela Ruggiero of the United States, German fencer Claudia Bokel, and Kirsty Coventry, who was nonetheless competing for Zimbabwe in swimming when she joined the IOC as an athlete member in 2013.

Coventry’s time period because the athlete delegate on the IOC board from 2018 to 2021 helped construct her platform to be elected final yr because the Olympic physique’s first feminine president.