IOC presidential aspirant: 'We run risk of losing women's sport'

PARIS — World Athletics president Sebastian Coe has vowed to protect women's sport following the gender eligibility row at this year's Paris Games if he becomes head of the International Olympic Committee.

Coe told AFP in an interview that ensuring a clear set of policies around women's participation would be top of his in-tray if he is elected next March to succeed Thomas Bach.

The 68-year-old Briton also vowed to widen the decision-making process surrounding Russia's re-admission to the Olympics.

Coe said the furore surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, who won Olympic gold medals in women's boxing despite failing gender tests at last year's world championships, left him "uncomfortable".

Boxing was a sport with "inherent dangers" which required crystal-clear guidelines from the top of the Olympic tree, he said.

"I don't think you can play fast and loose with a sport like boxing. You have to have clear policies as you do across all sports," Coe said, speaking after a World Athletics event launch in Budapest.

He added: "International federations are expecting that landscape to be created by the Olympic movement. It is a co-curation, if you like, but the thought leadership and the lead that needs to be taken does have to come through the Olympic movement.

"If we do not protect women's sport and we don't have a clear and unambiguous set of policies to do that, then we run the risk of losing women's sport.

"From a personal perspective, and as the president of an Olympic sport, I'm just not prepared for that to happen."

'Well-equipped' for role

Four decades after he won his second Olympic 1,500m gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Coe remains one of the world's best-known athletes.

Why then does he want to trade the leadership of the sport he loves for the fraught politics of the IOC?

"I tend to think I've been in training for this role my whole life. In fact pretty much from the age of 11 when I first put a pair of running shoes on," he said.

"I have a vision. Also critically, I do actually have a plan for what the next generation of the Olympic movement looks like. So, yes, I feel that I'm very well-equipped for that role."

He faces a formidable task to win. Some observers believe it is time for a woman to lead the Olympic movement for the first time and Zimbabwean former swimmer Kirsty Coventry is among the seven candidates.

Coventry sits on the IOC's powerful Executive Board but Coe, an IOC member since 2020, believes the Olympic movement could and should be better run.

"We really do have to look at ourselves as a movement and say, are we utilising the skills and the experiences of colleagues of mine that I sit alongside in sessions and congresses to the best effect?

"And I'm not sure we are, and I don't think we have the right structures that would allow us to do that optimally."

Coe made some enemies with his decision to ban Russians from athletics over mass doping and then following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Under Bach, the IOC has orchestrated the return of Russians under a neutral banner, but even under those conditions were barred from the athletics at the Paris Games.

Coe said he would consult more widely.

"I want to make sure, if I do become president, that I create structures that allow the members' voice not just to be heard, but to be acted upon," he said.

That would include "an Executive Board that is responsive to the members, and a president's office that is connected to all those stakeholders".

Global sport is feeling the pull of the Gulf's petrodollars and although Summer Olympics hosts are in place until the 2032 Brisbane Games, some observers believe Saudi Arabia will follow up its hosting of the 2034 football World Cup — the kingdom is the sole candidate — by bidding for an Olympics.

India is also eyeing the 2036 Games.

Coe said the more candidates, the better.

"We need to take our sport into regions and new territories that are going to fundamentally encourage more young people into sport," he said.

"I don't close my eyes or my thoughts to any country in any continent wanting to stage our events.

"I would actively encourage that competition amongst cities who have the ambition to want to do that and whose interests align with ours... whether it is Saudi Arabia, whether it is India, whether it is anywhere in the world."