Sebastian Coe welcomes new athletics start-ups amid push for innovation

MONACO – World Athletics president Sebastian Coe said he welcomed a number of innovative new track start-ups shaking up the sport’s status quo, as athletics moves to draw more eyeballs after another successful Olympics.

Former champion sprinter Michael Johnson’s Grand Slam Track launches in 2025 and investor Alexis Ohanian’s women’s-only Athlos will eye a repeat performance after a successful inaugural meet in September, both offering big paydays to lure top talent.

“We should be comforted that we’ve created a landscape that people think that it’s worth investing in our sport. They weren’t doing that five years ago,” Coe told reporters on Dec 4, following the World Athletics council meeting.

“I’m welcoming of all sorts of investment – within reason. And it’s important that we work as collaborators here, not competitors. I just see a rising tide as helping everybody,” the Briton, 68, added.

“I want them to be successful – I want them to add lustre to our sport and I think there’s space for everybody here.”

Grand Slam Track will feature four three-day, track-only events in Kingston, Jamaica and Miami, Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Johnson’s series is widely seen as a challenge to the established Diamond League circuit of meets as athletics fights for the limelight outside the Olympics and world championships.

The American told the BBC in November: “My objective is to create the opportunities that athletes have always wanted and to put them on a stage that is worthy of their greatness, with races that mean something.

“To do that you have to have the best competing against each other. That is what is compelling about the biggest sports in the world. That’s what we’re creating.”

World Athletics in 2024 broke with decades of tradition by paying Olympic gold medallists in Paris, riling other international sports federations and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) at a politically delicate time, with Coe a contender to succeed Thomas Bach as IOC president.

“I don’t think this is complicated – it was just a broader recognition that we are only an organisation that survives financially and with a sustainable revenue stream because of the extraordinary nature of our athletes,” Coe said.

The council approved the inclusion of the mixed 4x100m relay for the World Athletics Relays 2025 in Guangzhou, and new race walking distances, with the 20km and 35km events replaced by races over the half-marathon and marathon distance, from 2026.

The changes reflect the body’s embrace of innovation, Coe said, as World Athletics moves ahead with plans for the biennial World Athletics Ultimate Championship in 2026, with gold medallists receiving US$150,000 (S$201,000).

The three-day competition in Budapest is designed to address what Coe reluctantly described as the sport’s “fallow year” without the quadrennial Olympics or biennial world championships, and is “unashamedly designed for television”.

The absence of key events from the programme, however, including shot put, discus, women’s hammer, men’s triple jump, 10,000m and 3,000m steeplechase, has frustrated fans and athletes alike.

“We don’t have that concentration of roughly a billion eyeballs the way that we do with an Olympic Games or two world championships,” said Coe.

“It’s just not possible nor should we attempt to put every discipline into a three-hour format over three nights. We have consulted probably more extensively on this than we have on almost anything.”
REUTERS, AFP