World Athletics president Sebastian Coe confident Paris will get security balance right

DORTMUND – Having seen close up the enormous security challenge presented by the London 2012 Olympics, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said he thinks the organisers of the Paris Games will have the right balance between freedom and safety.

Coe oversaw a London Games that took place against a backdrop of potential risk of a major incident and with the constant association of the bomb attacks on the city that killed 52 people and injured over 700 on July 7, 2005 – the day after London was awarded the Games.

Paris is on high alert after its own major incidents and the organisers’ radical plan for the

opening ceremony to take place as a parade on the River Seine

is the obvious focal point for a potential attack.

“All Games are problematic from a security point of view. There hasn’t been a Games in modern time that hasn’t had to confront that,” Coe said on July 10.

“I was at the heart of London, so I know some of the complexity and you have to say now the world is significantly more complicated than it was in 2012.

“The best way to discuss security is actually never to discuss it. My absolute assumption is that all the right people and all the right agencies will be focusing on all the right issues in Paris. 

“The big challenge, of course, is to be proportionate as well, because the basis of the Games is to be a host city that opens its arms in welcome to over 200 countries. So the challenge is keeping everybody safe and secure, but not have people feeling that they're in lockdown city – it's never easy.”

He said he hoped Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky would join him at the athletics events, clarifying that he already had an invitation to the Games from the International Olympic Committee, but predicted that such is his humble nature that if he did attend, he would probably prefer to hunker down with his country’s coaches than join the VIPs.

Coe again underlined his and his sport’s firm line on excluding all Russian and Belarusian athletes from Paris – in contrast to many other sports that are allowing limited numbers to compete as neutrals.

“That decision was about integrity and balance,” said Coe, who visited Zelensky in Kiev in June. “Nothing I’ve seen has told me that that situation has changed or is likely to change in the immediate future.

“In Ukraine these are athletes who are trying to operate at the highest level and in a diminishing landscape of facility and provision. So, of course, this was never about passports or politics, it was actually about how, by conscience, can you stand aside and watch a nation that wants to be involved sportingly being so badly disadvantaged?” REUTERS