In an exclusive interview with Euronews, the President of World Athletics Sebastian Coe defended the organisation’s decision to keep Russian athletes barred from its events.
The International Olympic Committee announced in the summer that it was easing the relevant restrictions, but left it to each international sports federation to take its own decisions. Euronews asked whether, in the light of those developments and of decisions taken by other federations, World Athletics plans to change its stance.
Athletics is, after all, the sport often described as “the king of the Olympic Games”. Coe’s answer, however, leaves no room for misinterpretation: “We will maintain our position and we will defend our position.”
The second question concerned the pushback (on a legal basis) in recent months from the Russian side against the hard line taken by World Athletics. Over the summer, the Russian Athletics Federation lodged two appeals against World Athletics at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Lausanne (CAS), arguing that the decision to maintain the exclusion “affects the fundamental interests of athletics in Russia and restricts the right of Russian athletes to compete.”
Just last week, groups of Russian athletes appealed to the human rights commissions of the IOC and the UN, claiming that their exclusion violates their rights and is destroying their careers. Coe’s response to this barrage of Russian legal action was, once again: “We will maintain our position and we will defend our position.”
‘It is not a personal issue but one of philosophy’
This stance, banning Russian (and Belarusian) athletes from all World Athletics competitions, was recently described as “Coe’s personal obsession” by the executive director of the Russian Athletics Federation, Boris Yarisevsky.
“It is clear that there is something personal here. I believe this is simply his personal position. It is not the position of World Athletics. The sanctions against the Russian Athletics Federation are unprecedented. No other sports federation is facing such strict restrictions.
They not only prevent smooth day to day operations, they also hold back the development of athletics in Russia, especially among young athletes who cannot represent their country on the international stage.
We are seeking the lifting of the sanctions through the courts and are preparing our next steps to restore justice”, Yarisevsky. told Russian media.
Euronews asked Coe, a British Olympic champion who won four medals in Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984 to respond, and once again he was unequivocal, although this time more verbose: “Fighting for the integrity of competition and the integrity of competitors and the primacy of an international federation to decide how it determines eligibility is not a personal issue, it is one of philosophy.”
It should be noted that World Athletics imposed the current sanctions and full exclusion on Russian athletes in March 2022, as an immediate response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It was the first major sports federation to take such a decision and has kept it in place almost four and a half years later, even though the International Olympic Committee and other federations such as the international wrestling, judo and fencing federations and World Aquatics have already relaxed theirs.
Lesson from the ‘Ultimate Championship’
Sebastian Coe spoke to Euronews on the sidelines of the Ultimate Championship, the new World Athletics event staged last weekend in Budapest. He sees the competition as one of the key legacies he will leave to his successors when his term as World Athletics president ends in a year’s time.
“I hope it’s a very, very strong legacy because we’re looking at the sport in a very different way. We want this to feel different, to look different, particularly for the athletes. The prize money is significantly larger than we’ve ever had before, $10 million. And the format is significantly different because it’s not a full world championships with 2,000 athletes. It’s 381 from 65 different countries. But it really does determine the best of the best.”, Coe said at the outset.
The World Athletics president went on: “I think there are things we’re going to learn from this that we’re gonna be able to take into our world championships, maybe the Olympic program, around event presentation, around just being more exciting and more innovative in the stadium and what it looks like on television”.
The legacy of Coe’s 12-year presidency
Coe stood for re-election a year and a half ago, in a process held in Ancient Olympia. Kirsty Coventry ultimately came out on top.
Sebastian Coe will therefore complete his third and final four-year term as president of World Athletics in 2027. The federation’s statutes were amended at his initiative in order to avoid presidents staying in office for life, as was sometimes the case in the past.
He took over the leadership of what was then the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) in 2015, after elections held on the sidelines of the World Athletics Championships in Beijing, where, a year from now, his successor at the head of World Athletics will be chosen. The IAAF was renamed World Athletics in 2019.
We asked him for a brief assessment of his most significant achievements. He chose to highlight the following:
“We are now the best governed sport in the Olympic movement, by some distance. All the work that’s been done by the ASOIF Governance Review (Association of Summer Olympic International Federations) shows that, and that’s not where we started.
We’ve worked really hard to put governances, safeguards, checks, and balances in place. We have an athletic integrity unit that now has made independent all our drug testing, but also our integrity programs, the way we manage ourselves during elections all that is is very very different
I’m very pleased that we are the only olympic sport that has a gender balance council we have twenty six members thirteen men thirteen women and each and every one of them is there on merit
And that is important and in the last four years we’ve increased our revenues significantly and people want to invest in our sport. Across a whole series of metrics, we’re in much better shape than when I took over”.
‘No comment’ on Infantino and the Olympics
Sebastian Coe has achieved all this at a time when global sports governance appears to be in crisis, as shown by the growing pressure on FIFA president Gianni Infantino to step down from the head of world football’s governing body, and by the resignation of Edgar Grospiron, president of the organising committee for the 2030 Winter Olympic Games in the French Alps.
Given that Coe is himself the president of what he calls “the best governed” sport federation, and also served as president of the London 2012 Olympic Games Organising Committee.
When asked for his view, he provided a diplomatic answer: “I’m not really interested in other sports and I’m not really interesting in other organising committees. My responsibility is to chair the boards at World Athletics and I am satisfied that not only have we come a long way in improving our governance, we are the best governed sport in the world and I have a council that is accountable and responsible and those are the foundation stones for a very promising future.”, Coe replied.
“So, could everyone learn from you?” we asked, picking up on his remark. Coe, smiling, was quick to reply: “I’m not even saying that, I’m just saying that we’ve done what we have done in the best interests of our sport and that is the only way to manage an organisation.”