Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh joins International Olympic Committee along with seven new members

Michelle Yeoh, who is the first Asian actress to win an Oscar, joined the International Olympic Committee after being voted in as a member at a ceremony in Mumbai.

She was among the eight new proposed members to join the Olympic body.

For the unversed, Yeoh is a former Malaysian junior squash champion.

She won the Oscar for best lead actress earlier this year for her role in the film, ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’.

Michelle Yeoh got her big break in Hollywood after she was cast as the first ethnic Chinese Bond girl in 1997’s ‘Tomorrow Never Dies’ opposite Pierce Brosnan. She went on to star in martial arts movie ‘Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon’, the 2005 period drama ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ and the 2018 romantic comedy, ‘Crazy Rich Asians’.

Besides being an actor, Yeoh is also a producer and a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador.

Michelle Yeoh is married to Jean Todt, the former head of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile, the governing body for motorsport, which was recognised by the IOC in 2013.

Yeoh joins judoka Yael Arad, who won Israel’s first Olympic medal, Hungarian businessman and sports administrator Balasz Furjes, Cecilia Roxana Tait Villacorta, a former Olympic volleyball medallist and politician from Peru, and German sports entrepreneur Michael Mronz as the five new individual members.

Furjes and Mronz have also led efforts to get the Olympics to Hungary and back to Germany respectively.

Sweden’s Petra Soerling, head of the International Table Tennis Federation, and South Korean Kim Jae-youl, president of the International Skating Union, joined through their function as heads of an international federation.

Mehrez Boussayene, President of the Tunisian Olympic Committee, also joined.