IAAF President Sebastian Coe said that athletics "needs more head-to-head rivalries to reach younger fans who have switched off" from a sport that has "become boring," according to Martyn Herman of REUTERS. The sport had been "irreparably damaged" by the corruption and doping scandals that have "overshadowed the early months of his tenure," Coe added in a BBC program entitled "Can Seb Coe Save Athletics?" broadcast on Saturday. He added that just as important as regaining trust "was revamping a schedule that for most of the year meant there was no top-quality track-and-field action to watch." Coe: "There isn't enough athletics, we kid ourselves but there is not enough. We go from September through to May where frankly there is not much to be talking about or writing about; we have to remedy that. We have to extend the season into climates where you can compete and we have to develop those markets and make sure the athletes go head to head much more often." While tennis "enjoys rivalries such as those between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal," and football has Barcelona and Bayern Munich vying for superiority, "athletics struggles for the same appeal." Finding more Usain Bolts "would help but athletics was not a conveyor belt," Coe said, adding that the top names in the sport's various disciplines "needed to be more visible on the track and also in social media, an area he said athletics was bad at." He said that the format of the world championships, which will be in London next year, "needed to change." Coe: "We have to be realistic. Will we have a world championships format that is shorter? No, not straight away. Will we have that in five years? We have to. It's about survival and doing some really radical things" (REUTERS, 3/26).
COE ADDRESSES DOPING: REUTERS' Ken Ferris reported Coe claimed that the IAAF "is proactive in tackling doping and not protective of drug cheats." Coe said that the IAAF "was at the forefront of catching drug cheats." He said, "I think the IAAF has been far, far more proactive than it has been protective. If you don't go fishing you don't catch fish and there are many sports that have taken that attitude. The IAAF hasn't actually." An independent WADA commission also said "corruption was embedded" at the IAAF under former president Lamine Diack. Diack is "under formal investigation in France on suspicion of corruption and money-laundering linked to concealing positive drug tests." Coe: "A few people infiltrated a system and caused us irreparable damage. There's no point in even pretending otherwise. But actually if you look at all the key advances that have been made in sport around anti-doping, they've more than often been driven by my sport. The athlete biological passport, the out-of-competition random testing" (REUTERS, 3/26).
