Sebastian Coe is one of the few global sports administrators that had gone through ranks of being an athlete to administer the sport they cherish. Apart from being an athlete, Coe studied Economics and Social History at Loughborough University while he came into limelight on March 14, 1977, when he competed in the 800m at the European Indoor Championships in San Sebastián, front-running the entire race and winning in 1:46.54, just short of the world indoor record. In 1979, Coe set three world records in 41 days. He set the first two in Oslo, Norway, at 800m (1:42.33) and the mile (3:48.95), then broke the world 1500m record with his 3:32.03 in Zurich, Switzerland, becoming the first person to hold these three records at the same time. Following Coe’s retirement from athletics, he was a Conservative member of parliament from 1992 to 1997 for Falmouth and Camborne in Cornwall, and became a Life Peer on 16 May 2000. He headed the successful London 2012 Olympic bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics and became chairman of the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games. In 2007, he was elected a vice-president of the World Athletics (WA), and re-elected for another four-year term in 2011. In August 2015, he was elected president of WA. From his vision for World Athletics to his advice for athletes and organisers in the build-up to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Coe shares insight into the past and future of the sport through the World Athletics website.
“I don’t think our challenge is any different from any of the other sports. The holy grail in any sport is: how do you get young people involved, how do you remain exciting and salient, and how do we get into their landscape? All these things are what we are figuring out. We have an innovation unit at World Athletics, it is run by our former director of competition, Jakob Larsen, who thinks out of the box. We need to make changes, not for the sake of it. But there are lots of things that we have settled for in the last 150 years and we’ve got to change.”
“I am more confident and optimistic about the range of talent that we have now got (in athletics). You’ve got the most extraordinary athletes across all our disciplines. I don’t think we’ve ever had so much strength in depth.
“We’ve got the Netflix documentary that is going to be run in the weeks leading up to the Olympic Games, we’re looking to extend that involvement. There have been quite a lot of very good documentaries and films about people, past and present, in the sport. There’s a lot we can do to help raise the profile. I do respectfully say to athletes … your passport is your performance. If you run fast, you jump high, you are going to get into that landscape. But really to make an impact, you’ve got to go beyond the track – you’ve got to spend time and you’ve got to be prepared to share time. Sometimes it’s really painful to have to think about things other than training. But it is helping grow the pie.”
“To the athletes, it has always been a consistent message and I recognise it from my own career – athletes tend to do things in an Olympic year they wouldn’t normally do in another year, and I just say don’t play around with the variables. If you’ve got a training environment that’s good, if you’ve got a coaching structure that works, don’t suddenly be tempted – because it’s an Olympic year – to go off and do something that you’ve never done before. Keep grounded and stay in the environment that you are comfortable in and you’ve got your support networks, your friends, your family. Don’t try and do things that are alien just because it’s an Olympic year.
“And to the organisers, it’s really simple: if you deliver a Games through the eyes of the athlete, it will be a good Games. Eighty percent of the project management you will get right if you have the lens of an athlete. If you do everything with a focus on the athletes, then you can’t fail to make it a good event.”
Culled from World Athletics website