Tsunekazu Takeda

Tsunekazu Takeda's résumé reads like a straight line to the top: born in Tokyo in 1947, Keio University, Olympic equestrian, then decades inside sports administration culminating in the presidency of the Japanese Olympic Committee. Then, in March 2019, he stepped down amid a corruption investigation connected to the Tokyo bid, and resigned his International Olympic Committee membership as well. I find the shape of that story more interesting than either half alone. Sports governance is one of the few fields where a genuine athletic career and a political one can run into each other, and where the second almost always overwrites the first in public memory. Very few people outside Japan could tell you what he rode or how he placed. Almost anyone following Olympic politics that year remembers the resignation. Whatever one concludes about the allegations, that asymmetry is the durable lesson: in the Olympic movement, how you leave the room tends to define you.

Name (English)

Tsunekazu Takeda

Name (Japanese)

竹田恆和

Reading

たけだ つねかず

Born

November 1, 1947 (age 78)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Scorpio / Boar

Origin

Tokyo, Japan

Occupation

businessperson / equestrian

University

Keio University

• Wikipedia (English)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunekazu%20Takeda
• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%AB%B9%E7%94%B0%E6%81%86%E5%92%8C
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3246901

Tags

• Tokyo
• businessperson
• equestrian

Last updated

2026-08-07

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.