Sebastian Coe: “We must support technological innovation that helps athletes perform better” | Sports

Sebastian Coe was so happy in his shoes, and so happy that at the Tokyo Games that his athletics regained first place in Olympic sports due to the attention, viewers, and media noise, that he doesn’t even shy away from joking when asked if it looks like 2022 will become impossible for athletes and fans, with Having many great events scheduled, which has accumulated due to the delay of the Tokyo Games due to the epidemic: 14 Diamond League encounters, the World Cup indoors (Belgrade) and outdoors (Eugene, Oregon), Summer Europe (Munich) and also the Commonwealth Games (Birmingham).

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Athletes still doubt what competitions they will set up, where they will have the best chance to shine, secure a scholarship, and sponsorship; Fans fear that performance saturation will lead to inflation, interest depletion, and Coe’s smiles and jokes. The World Cup in Oregon, the cradle of the Nike empire, and the first in history to be held on US soil, will coincide in July 2022 with the Tour de France, an unprecedented synchronization that will surely ruin two of the most-watched sports yet. In football, television interest and space in newspapers must be divided. “I’ve got pretty clear where I’ll be in those weeks, heh, and Peter, my dad too… I’m sure he’ll pick the tour,” Coe laughs. “Of course, no one would have chosen to have three big events in five weeks, but we are not in a perfect world. I know from my conversations with some of the chiefs that everyone is aware of the challenges and the necessity of choosing, but we have tried to do it in a way that all athletes can participate in all competitions. From what I spoke with athletes, among them the expectation to try to win the most titles, and not the pessimism, prevail.

When Lamine Diack, the former president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, died at the beginning of December, many leaders who were part of his responsibility refused to write a few lines of obituaries. One explained, “We can only write ugly things, and it doesn’t make sense to do that to a dead person.” Nor did his successor at the forefront of world athletics, Sebastien Coe, vice-president of Senegal for eight years, open his mouth to express his pain and grief at the disappearance of a person sentenced to prison for corruption, turning his term into a fund-raising machine.. Covering up the positives of doping and buying votes from African leaders in the Olympic site elections. Koe was politically silent.

As an athlete, Coe, a 65-year-old Englishman, was one of the best long-distance runners in history, a double Olympic champion (1980 and 1984) and world mile record holder for the 1500, 1000 and 800 metres. As a leader, after a while as a member of Parliament Tori In Westminster, Lord Sebastian Coe represents the federally minded group of private corporate executives, with minimal, space and marketing in mind. He shined at the helm of the London 2012 Organizing Committee and since his election in August 2015 at the helm of athletics has made an effort to erase any trace of his facade that smelled of the past (with the exception of the Athletics Museum which has made an upgrade). One of his first actions was to change the name of the federation, which from its old and complex acronym IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) became simple WA (World Athletics, World Athletics). Also, in accordance with guidelines set by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), he separated from his kingdom the duties of controlling and penalizing doping, the lure of corruption and the corresponding stigma. “Athletics has completely changed in my six years in office,” Coe explains in a year-end video conference with five Spanish journalists. “Although we were already working on it in the days of Diack, when we started looking for answers to three questions – how do we be more transparent? Who do we want in athletics? How do we make athletics grow? – when I arrived. The presidency we created the Independent Integrity Unit, which is Not only responsible for doping, but also for athletes’ problems.”

standard inflation

Coe doesn’t want to pass for oblivion, but rather for intelligence: his goal is to keep his shiny shoes from getting dirty. It is the new image of athletics, the sport that in the post-Bolt years struggles for supremacy, the top of a tower in which inertia can be built to continue growing, not driven by a one-star personality but by a disconnect Jill Coe, Young people from all over the world born in the second half of the 1990s or a little earlier – Yulimar Rojas, Ryan Kreuzer, Mundo Duplantis, Athing Mo, Jacob Ingbrigtsen, Karsten Warholm, Sidney McLaughlin – … who jumped and determined to break the boundaries and records of the dark past for athletics. They are the perfect faces to give a human and smiling face to the tech innovation dictatorship that is seeding a torrent of world records in all distances and disciplines, led by atomic sneaker manufacturer Nike. Standard inflation reduces the value of records and increases the value of events strongly supported by Coe.

“Our role as sports regulators is to support innovation that helps athletes train and perform better,” says the WA President. “We have to do and do it, while always looking for a balance so that there is fair play and that new technology is reasonably accessible to everyone. That is why, in a couple of years, we will reduce the maximum height of sock soles by five millimeters, from 25 to 20 inches.

The foam and carbon sole isn’t the only ingredient that decides foot-to-ground ratio, or speed. Synthetic track material also plays a role, as evidenced by the Tokyo Olympic Stadium, which is lined with Italian manufacturer Mondo. “I support the Mondo men in everything, as well as their idea of ​​using different materials for the Paris 2024 Games in different parts of the stadium: sprints, bottoms, jumps, throws … and not only to improve the scores but also to think about the well-being of the athletes, avoiding what happened in Tokyo with German javelin throwers, who have not been able to express themselves to the fullest due to the deterioration of the running space,” says Coe of a brand with which he has already signed agreements for the Olympic Stadium in London and which, like Coe himself, seeks more transient brilliance in the tracks instead of permanence. “His projects are a natural progression. They are welcome.”

Lest anyone say his feet are off the ground, when the former British athlete was asked to rate young Ingbrigitsen, the 1,500-meter Norwegian Olympic champion, Koe literally threw himself into the mud. “A lot has been said about him, but what really touched my soul is how by winning the European Cross Country he has shown the young coaches that it is absolutely possible to win at the highest level on the track in winter and summer,” says Coe, who seizes the opportunity to advance his idea in The cross made the 28th Olympic race in Los Angeles, giving the Norwegian another chance for a medal.“I take the cross very seriously because it is part of the path to follow to achieve fullness on the track.”

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