Paris was incroyable but how can athletics maintain the momentum?

Seb Coe admits it is the ‘holy grail’ for every sport and he offers some ideas as the 2024 Games draw to a close

Eleven days of athletics in Paris this month saw three world records and 13 Olympic records. Every session at the Stade France was full as the capacity crowd watched Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Faith Kipyegon, Cole Hocker, Sifan Hassan, and others etch their names into the Olympic history books. What’s more, the global nature of the sport was illustrated by 75 nations enjoying the top eight placings.

So where do we go from here? How can Seb Coe and his team at World Athletics build on this and keep the momentum going?

“It’s the holy grail,” said Coe as he met the media on the final day of the Games. “The challenge for every sport is to remain salient and exciting and to try to get new audiences. It’s what we spend most of our waking hours thinking about.”

Coe mentioned the importance of the new World Athletics Ultimate Championships at the end of the 2026 season in Budapest to give fans a global event to focus on that year in addition to reconfiguring the season so that everything ends with the biggest event on the calendar. “The LA Olympics (2028) is also important to us,” he added. “The American market is a difficult one.”

Coe is well aware of the challenge. “US athletes were mobbed leaving the stadium here but they can walk through their home towns in anonymity,” he noted.

Coe pointed to the Netflix Sprint series and other documentaries that have been released this year such as programmes on Daley Thompson and Linford Christie. But he acknowledged that most weeks it is difficult to find the live athletics event you want to watch due to the sheer number of TV channels, web streams and geo-blocking barriers involved.

“My brother is a US citizen and it (being unable to find athletics to watch) is the weekend rant I usually get from him. We do need to get the sport on free to air, though. It’s very important to us.”

There are also a number of innovations being tested, with the mixed 4x100m being among them. “They are data driven and have to make a positive difference if we are going to bring any of them in,” he said.

World Athletics need to get the athletes more on side, though. Miltos Tentoglou, for example, the multiple global long jump champion, once again had a dig about World Athletics in Paris. “Athletes like myself are never consulted about changes,” he said after winning gold.

For now, though, the sport can bask in the satisfaction of a brilliant Olympics having come to a finish. Coe was full of praise for the organizing committee too.

“I know how hard it is to put a Games on,” the former London 2012 chairman said. “It’s the toughest piece of project management that any city is faced with in normal times. We had 11 days of extraordinary sumptuous athletics here.”

Coe says the most surreal moment of the Games was “having Snoop Dogg on one side and Simone Biles on the other and finding myself explaining the ins and outs of the 1500m to them”.

He added: “At that moment the sport was actually cool! It’s the first time my kids have thought anything I’ve done on this planet has been remotely cool.”

Coe also believes technological advancements will help the sport continue to thrive as well. Improved tracks and shoes have contributed to him falling down the all-time 800m rankings in recent weeks from No.3 to No.8 but he said: “Are we better off for tech? Indisputably. Does it help create more exciting athletics and athletes with longer careers? Yes.”

World Athletics even changed part of its rulebook last year to allow Paris to put different synthetic surfaces down on various parts of the track used by runners, jumpers or throwers in order to help athletes from various disciplines perform better.

“I don’t want to be the president that’s the equivalent of the “computer that says ‘no’,” he said, “but at the same time we do have checks and balances.”

Finally, he made this point. “I was asked many times what we would you do when Usain Bolt left the sport. It is the same question that boxing faced when Muhammad Ali retired.

“I said ‘mark my words, new athletes will come through. And they have.

“We have a greater band-with across broader range of disciplines in the sport than ever before. In Paris we saw the 105^th country in history of the sport winning a medal – with Saint Lucia, Pakistan and Dominica taking titles.”

Whatever ideas Coe has, the sport won’t benefit from his guidance for much longer. He is now into his final term as World Athletics president and said on Sunday he will give “serious thought” about throwing his hat into the ring to succeed Thomas Bach as head of the International Olympic Committee.

“I’ve always made it clear that if the opportunity arose, I will obviously give it serious thought,” he said. “The opportunity has arisen and clearly I need to think about that. Of course I’m going to consider this.”

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