World champs delay on cards

GLOBAL athletics chief Sebastian Coe has indicated that next year’s World Athletics Championships, scheduled to be held in Eugene, Oregon, the US, could slip to 2022 as a consequence of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics being postponed for a year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Already we’ve been in discussion with the organising committee in Oregon about shifting the date and maybe even discussing moving it to 2022 to accommodate the need for an Olympic Games next year,” Coe, World Athletics president, told Sky Sports television this week.“We all have to be flexible; we’re living in very uncertain times and this is going to take a lot of thinking about.”

Any decision on dates would have towait, however, for the International Olympic Committee to state exactly when the Tokyo Games would take place. On Tuesday the IOC said the July 24-August 9 Games would be held no later than the summer of 2021.

Coe, who chaired the London 2012 Games organising committee, said the decision to postpone Tokyo was “by a distance” the right one even if sorting out the calendar would be a huge task.

“The world is in a really difficult, dangerous situation. We wrote to the IOC on Sunday after I’d met with all my continental presidents; I’d spoken to my council and at length to the athletes,” he said.

“And it was really the athletes, for us, that made this decision the right decision.

“If you are fighting to preserve the integrity of competition, which is really an Olympic value, then to have athletes that are simply locked in their houses and not able to train or use public facilities... then clearly the integrity of the competition was going to disappear.” | Reuters