Coming off a strong year, highlighted by the 2020 Tokyo Games, World Athletics is poised for more success in 2022.
Speaking virtually to a small group of reporters from across the globe, World Athletics president Sebastian Coe is pleased with the direction of his federation.
“We’ve come out of the Tokyo Games as the number one Olympic sport,” Coe told Around the Rings. “The data the IOC has commissioned confirms it. We had the highest number of broadcast viewing hours in Tokyo by a wide margin, the largest number of media articles written and the highest number of shared articles across social media, which was roughly 700 million and that led to over 62 million conversations on social media centered on athletics.”
Of vital importance next year for World Athletics is the World Athletics Championships Oregon22 to be contested July 15-24, 2022 in the United States.
“Oregon is a really important moment for our sport,” said Coe. The U.S. is the largest sports market for us and we need to leave there with an indelible footprint.”
“We need to make sure we leave Oregon with all the fruit. It’s the opportunity to create more competition events that allow there to be more of a two-way street for European and African athletes to be competing in the U.S.”
In that regard, Coe is very interested in the progress for LA28. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently dropped weightlifting and boxing from the LA28 program due to widespread doping and leadership concerns within their respective federations. Athletics obviously won’t have to worry about its spot in the LA28 program or any Summer Games for the near future, and Coe believes it’s because World Athletics has been at the forefront of acknowledging doping issues and doing something about them.
“We created the Athletic Integrity Unit in 2017. In 2016 we had the reforms that got passed, and by 2017, less than a year-and-a-half after the suspension of the Russian Federation, we had the Athletic Integrity up and running,” Coe told Around the Rings.
“We didn’t sit on our hands. There is a distinct difference between what athletics has done and how other sports have dealt with this issue,” said Coe. “From a personal standpoint, I’m sorry to see weightlifting and boxing go. They are two sports I really enjoy. But neither sport did enough to save itself. When it did have the opportunity, it didn’t choose to take the path athletics did.”
Coe believes athletics is most the understandable and accessible of sports. He pointed out there are millions of people every week who identify themselves as participant runners.
“All of those people are very important to us as we look to keep growing our sport.”
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