LAUSANNE / AIPS: World Athletics president Sebastian Coe is running one of the greatest races of his life, among the seven candidates bidding to succeed Thomas Bach in the IOC presidential election on March 20 in Greece.

Lord Coe, in a major cv resume, said: “This is a role that I felt that I’ve been pretty much in training for most of my life – whether as an Olympic athlete, president of a National Olympic Committee, president of a bid, president of an organising committee in London, and then, of course, the president of World Athletics . . . and along the way, a government minister, a member of parliament, and somebody who’d been in sports marketing for 30 years.”

Coe was responding to an online question-and-answer session organised by the international sports journalists’ association AIPS.

The 68-year-old won four Olympic medals – including two 1500m golds – and set eight outdoor and three indoor world records in middle-distance track events. He was speaking from Apeldoorn, Netherlands, at the European Athletics Indoor Championships.

Coe, an IOC member since 2020, shared athlete-focused plans for the Olympic movement as well his his views on transgender athletes, prize money at the Olympics, artificial intelligence, the fight against doping and the participation of athletes in the Olympics amid war.

The Q-and-A

Who convinced you to run this special race to become IOC president?

No one person. It was only on the last day in Paris that any of us knew there would be that opportunity and when you are president of the central sport at an Olympic Games, you tend to be focusing on everything related to helping deliver a magnificent track and field championships.

I thought long and hard about it and [felt] this is a role I felt I’ve been pretty much in training for most of my life. So I consulted my family, the most important people in my life, and decided I have the competence and track record to sensibly offer my services.

Of course, the democrat in me tells me that this is ultimately a judgment that the members will make and should make. I’ve lent heavily on all the previous experiences that I’ve had in sport, and I’ve served in pretty much every one of those stakeholders.

What is your position on transgender competitors?

My position is the one I’ve always held and delivered through World Athletics. This is also a societal issue. We’re not hermetically sealed in sport, we have to understand the mores of the day and some of the cultural influences.

The guiding principle for me sits with the word integrity – the integrity of competition and the promotion and integrity of women’s sport. If you lose sight of that and don’t have policies that are clear and unambiguous, then you are going to get into difficult and dangerous territory.

We want women entering our sport to feel that there are no barriers to what they can do, and that is why the regulations that we have agreed around DSD and transgender are important and non-negotiable.

As a potential president of the IOC I want to work closely with the international federations, more closely with the national Olympic committees, but also very closely with the athletes. They are an essential part of this journey.

How would you deal with the participation of athletes from countries at war?

Sport has been through the complexities of the Cold War, it has been through conflagrations, it has been through challenges – social and cultural. I’m not sure this is any different. The principles absolutely remain the same, that you can only deal with what you have in front of you.

Back in 1979 when Britain was heading towards the boycott of the Moscow Games, I fought probably the most powerful peacetime Prime Minister that Britain had created and, in simple terms, I went toe to toe at the British Olympic Association and we went to the Olympic Games.

In my period as president of World Athletics, I’ve had to deal with some significant issues. Just in the last few weeks, I’ve met two or three international leaders. That’s not unusual for me, either. So yes, the world is complex. I’m not sure it’s any more complex than it’s ever been.

Is it possible to find a real solution to doping?

I was one of the first athletes to speak at an Olympic Congress. I was also asked to synthesize the views of 38 individual competitors that went to the Congress in what was West Germany that year. I was given four minutes, and for two minutes, 41 seconds of that, I talked about the insidious nature of doping, the lack of integrity, the demands that it placed, both physically and mentally on competitors.

So I’ve been not just talking about this but delivering. I delivered the first out-of-competition testing system in the United Kingdom in the middle of the 1980s and then of course the Athletic Integrity Unit. That was a part of the reforms that we drove through shortly after becoming president of the sport. I think most people now consider it to be gold standard.

The purpose of a well structured anti-doping programme is not just to weed the cheats out, it is to protect the birthright, the dedication, sometimes in decades, of clean athletes.

World Athletics introduced prize money for its gold medallists at the Paris Olympics. Should the IOC implement this or should it be left to the federations?

The implementation of prize money in athletics was sport wide. It went through our council, it went through our executive board, it went through our risk committees, it went through our athletes commission. But nobody should assume that if I become president of the IOC that prize money will simply implemented because we did it in World Athletics.

This is not a one size fits all. We did it for a very particular reason in athletics, and that was that many of our competitors have transferable skills. They make good baseball players, they make good basketball players, they make good fast bowlers at cricket, in some parts of the world now netball as well.

So our athletes were in high demand and we have always wanted to make sure we’ve created, where possible, the financial wellbeing for them, sometimes to maintain their presence in the sport, sometimes for another Olympic cycle, sometimes to give them a cushion when they retire.

But nobody should run away with the idea that that is something that I would automatically assume is applicable to every International federation, every National Olympic Committee.

The days of command and control from the centre have to be over. They’ve been out of date for 30 years, we have to open the windows, there has to be oxygen, and we have to have collaborative discussions – and I would certainly encourage a discussion in that space.

There are lots of things we can do. We can share data with the athletes. It would be like gold dust and would allow them to create financial platforms, not just on the field of play but away from the field of play.

The IOC is often perceived as rigid institution that is out of touch with modern realities. What three key reforms would you implement to the modernise the IOC and make it more responsive to the needs of athletes and fans?

The biggest challenge we all have is making sure that young people choose sport as a way of fashioning their future. It is the most potent social worker in all our communities. We need a membership that is empowered to help shape that journey. And I have concluded from my many discussions that there are talented members sitting around me, some far smarter than me, whose skill and experience are not being utilised properly.

So it’s about sport first, it’s about engaging with the next generation, because without them, we have nothing, it’s about putting athletes at the heart of every decision we make because without them we have no sport, and finally, it is to make sure that we have a membership that is empowered and that we free their skills and abilities to help shape the direction that we want.

Do you think the Olympic Congress, which was last held in 2009, is the way go in resolving issues in the Olympic Movement?

I think what the Olympic Movement needs to do is to meet more often, create more safe space for debate. We can’t have a room of highly talented people sitting there, rubber-stamping policies that are created elsewhere and nudging them through in a way that does not allow for proper analysis.

This is about people as well. We need to work more closely, more collaboratively, with our national Olympic committees and our international federations but we need to give more space for debate.

If I do get across the line the first thing I will do is I will set a date in our calendars while we’re all there, and take the membership away for three or four days, put our foot on the ball and figure out what it is we want to achieve in the next 10 years.

How are we going to do it, and how do we define ourselves? This has to be a member led-organization. We need to make sure we have the people in the right places and with the right ability to be able to shape the future of the movement.

The Olympic movement is not broken. It is an extraordinary movement and it still provides the most extraordinary, indelible memories for people in their lives.

There are challenges we’ve talked about. There are geopolitical challenges. I don’t think there are any greater or any more profound than generations before have dealt with. We have commercial challenges. The commercial model is out of date. I know that. I’ve been in the sports marketing business for the last 30 years.

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