Seb Coe admits it is the ‘holy grail’ for every sport and he offers some ideas as 2024 Games draw to a close
Eleven days of athletics in Paris this month saw three world records and 13 Olympic records. Every session at the Stade the France was full as the capacity crowd watched Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Faith Kipyegon, Cole Hocker, Sifan Hassan and others etch their names into the Olympic history books. What’s more, the global nature of the sport was illustrated by 75 nations enjoying top eight placings.
So where do we go from here? How can Seb Coe and his team at World Athletics build on this and keep the momentum going?
“It’s the holy grail,” said Coe as he met the media on the final day of the Games. “The challenge for every sport is to remain salient and exciting and to try to get new audiences. It’s what we spend most of our waking hours thinking about.”
Coe mentioned the importance of the new World Athletics Ultimate Championships at the end of the 2026 season in Budapest to give fans a global event to focus on that year in addition to reconfiguring the season so that everything ends with the biggest event on the calendar. “The LA Olympics (2028) is also important to us,” he added. “The American market is a difficult one.”
Cole Hocker (Getty)
Coe is well aware of the challenge. “US athletes were mobbed leaving the stadium here but they can walk through their home towns in anonymity,” he noted.
Coe pointed to the Netflix Sprint series and other documentaries that have been released this year such as programmes on Daley Thompson and Linford Christie. But he acknowledged that most weeks it is difficult to find the live athletics event you want to watch due to the sheer number of TV channels, web streams and geo-blocking barriers involved. “My brother is a US citizen and it (being unable to find athletics to watch) is the weekend rant I usually get from him. We do need to get the sport on free to air, though. It’s very important to us.”
There are also a number of innovations being tested, with the mixed 4x100m being among them. “They are data driven and have to make a positive difference if we are going to bring any of them in,” he said.
Seb Coe (Getty)
World Athletics need to get the athletes more on side, though. Miltos Tentoglou, for example, the multiple global long jump champion, once again had a dig about World Athletics in Paris. “Athletes like myself are never consulted about changes,” he said after winning…
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