As Seb Coe begins his final four years as World Athletics President he looks back on Budapest 2023 and reveals exciting news of a three-night made-for-TV athletics spectacle in 2026
My competitive experiences of World Championships have been abysmal. I was injured for the first one, injured for the second one and was retired by 1991 in Tokyo. So I didn’t actually compete in a World Championships. But I’m fully making up for these omissions now.
Budapest was a very special World Championships because it was the 40th anniversary of the first one in 1983 in Helsinki and it was also the first one that gave me the opportunity from the outset to decide what it should look like.
I became President of World Athletics in 2015 and it’s inevitable that any incoming President inherits already chosen, existing World Championships. Budapest was the first that I could say was mine.
The No.1 requisite was simple. I didn’t want an empty stadium. It makes our sport look marginal unless we’ve got noisy passionate, knowledgeable fans in the theatre. And that’s what we had. We sold tickets to well over 100 countries. In 1983 there were about 1300 athletes from 150 countries. This year we had almost 2100 from 197 countries. The field was really strong. Everywhere you look, everybody performed at the very highest level.
Faith Kipyegon leads the 5000m in Budapest (Getty)
As President, I have to be balanced and fair, but I’m always going to drift towards middle-distance running and I must say how much I loved the season Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon has had. The first woman to break 3:50 for the 1500m; a week later in the Diamond League in Paris she broke the 5000m world record.
She left Budapest with gold medals from an extraordinarily difficult double, the 1500m and the 5000m. Very few have achieved it. So, for me she is the female performer of the year. As a Laureus Academy Member I will be watching to see if she is nominated for the 2024 Laureus World Sports Awards in the New Year.
In the past we’ve been conservative, we’ve had it in the stadium, often at the end of the evening when most people are actually home or on buses. This time, it was in front of thousands of people in a fan zone. I think it’s highly unlikely we’re ever going to go back to presentations in a stadium.
We also changed the way that we introduce the athletes. They don’t just come out now and find their lane. We showcase it. I think the public needs to be nudged gently about our history. So 1500m winner Josh Kerr walked out, past Steve Cram and Hicham El Guerrouj, which shows that we’re a sport with a deep history and heritage.
Josh Kerr (Getty)
I’m very honoured to be given the stewardship of the sport. The first four years were difficult. We had come through a really bad period and it was self-inflicted. We didn’t have the right governance in place, people behaved appallingly badly. I remember having to travel almost every day of the week, just to keep our sponsors on board.
The next four years was dealing with all the things that we certainly could not have done while we were in crisis mode; issues around transfers of allegiance; the way the calendar comes together; the challenges of state sponsored doping in Russia; the illegal invasion of Ukraine.
Then we had to get the building blocks in place before we can really do what I want to in the last four years of my mandate, which is to have a ruthless, forensic analysis of what is working and what isn’t. Particularly around competition.
We’ve come out of an extraordinary World Championships and we have an amazing platform to build on. Our next World Championships in two years will be in Tokyo. In Budapest we saw some of the best broadcast numbers we’ve ever seen in the first weekend: 28 million in Japan alone were watching athletics.
I’m not designing the sport just around 15 and 16-year-olds, but you do need to recognise that the world has changed. The way young people consume everything has altered. And we need to make sure that our competitions are exciting and salient.
We should question whether a nine-day World Championships is too much. Does it fit into the lifestyles of people?
We talk about our season being May through to September, but it’s really July through to September. And that isn’t the basis of a professional sport. So we do need to get the athletes out on more occasions, we need to see more head-to-heads, that’s what excites people.
2026 is important for us because, from this point, it’s the first year where we don’t have a World Championships or an Olympic Games, so we’re going to create a three-night athletics spectacle. It will be a television product. We’ll take a limited number of the very best athletes per event and there will be a big prize pot.
Also, Netflix have been following our 100m runners, male and female, through the season. The last filming was at the World Championships. There will be a series of 40-minute programmes leading up to the Paris Olympics.
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Athletics is, by some distance, the largest Olympic sport and a fifth of the competitors you will be seeing in Paris next year are track and field athletes, so we have an amazing platform. That’s why Paris matters so much.
This is a start, but we have to continue to future-proof the sport. Some tough decisions may need to be made. But by the time I leave, I hope our sport will look very much different.
Sebastian Coe is President of World Athletics and a Member of Laureus – a sporting movement supported by the world’s greatest athletes, which celebrates and harnesses the power of sport