COE ON RUSSIANS AT EUGENE WORLDS: INCONCEIVABLE
EUGENE, Oregon—the leader of global track and field said it would have been “inconceivable” to have allowed Russians into this week’s world championships given the country’s war against Ukraine.
At his news conference late last week, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said there was no budging from the position the federation took shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine in February.
“It was made from a very clear standpoint, and that was about the integrity of competition,” Coe said. “It would have been inconceivable to have a world championships here with athletes from Belarus and Russia, two aggressive nations who have walked into an independent state.”
Belarus, an ally of Russia in the war, is also banned from the worlds, which ran from Friday and ends on July 24.
One Russian athlete, three-time world-champion high jumper Maria Lasitskene, has publicly criticized Coe and International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach for their stance on her country.
The IOC recommended that sports exclude Russia from their events, and many sports followed that lead. Coe noted that World Athletics was one of the first federations to reach a position, one that won’t change “for the foreseeable future,” in large part because of the challenges involved in getting the 22 Ukrainian athletes who qualified for worlds safely to the championships.
The position on Russia is separate from that country’s athletics federation’s ongoing suspension, which dates to 2015. That stems from the long-running doping scandal that spread through Russia starting two years previous to that. The suspension triggered a sanction that limited the number of Russian athletes who can compete at major events as neutrals. At the last worlds, in 2019, 29 competed.
But that program isn’t in play here because of the war. Coe said that in this week’s council meeting, members received an update about the doping issues from the task force in charge with monitoring Russia’s compliance to the road map for reinstatement.
“I sort of feel like it’s Season 17, Box Set 126” on the issue, Coe said, before ticking off the latest updates from the task force.
Most important is an independent audit of the Russian federation, results of which will be presented at a council meeting in November.
That’s also when the council will consider changes in rules governing participation by transgender athletes and intersex athletes. Earlier this summer, Coe signaled that changes to those rules could be coming, but he said it was not an agenda item in this week’s meetings.
“Though inclusivity has really been a watch word, the balance between inclusivity and fairness will always, in my view, fall now on the side of fairness,” he said in repeating comments he’d made earlier this summer that indicate there could be tighter restrictions on allowing transgender and intersex athletes to compete.
TOKYO HOSTS 2025 WORLDS
TRACK and field officials awarded the 2025 world championships to Tokyo on Thursday, bringing runners, jumpers and throwers back to the home of last year’s Olympics, where they competed in front of mostly empty stands.
The World Athletics Council awarded the championships in a bidding contest that also included Nairobi, Kenya; Silesia, Poland; and Singapore.
Sebastian Coe said it was a close vote, but Japan won on the strength of, among other things, “human resource” available in Tokyo to put on the event and strong commercial partnerships.
He did not rule out the possibility of track’s marquee event someday making it to Kenya or another country in Africa—a continent that has never held the event.
“It is really important that we work together with Africans to make sure that their time comes, and their time comes when it’s right,” Coe said.
Japan spent more than $1.4 billion to build the stadium for the Olympics, which were postponed by one year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, then held last summer under restrictions that prevented fans from attending.
The state-of-the-art track in Tokyo helped Sydney Mclaughlin and Karsten Warholm each break world records in their 400-meter hurdle finals. Warholm ran in 45.94 seconds and Mclaughlin finished in 51.46 but broke that record earlier this year (51.41) in Eugene.
Elaine Thompson-herah finished the 100 in 10.61 seconds to break Florence Griffith-joyner’s 33-yearold Olympic record.
This year’s world championships, which begin Friday at Hayward Stadium in Eugene, were also pushed back one year because of the pandemic. Next year’s games will be held in Budapest, Hungary.
Coe said the losing cities expressed interest in the next round of bidding, for the 2027 and 2029 championships.
World Athletics also awarded its cross country championships to Medulin, Croatia in 2024 and Tallahassee, Florida in 2026.