PARIS: World Athletics President Sebastian Coe has vowed to protect women´s sport following the gender eligibility row at this year´s Paris Games if he becomes head of the International Olympic Committee.
Coe told AFP in an interview that ensuring a clear set of policies around women´s participation would be top of his in-tray if he is elected next March to succeed Thomas Bach. The 68-year-old Briton also vowed to widen the decision-making process surrounding Russia´s re-admission to the Olympics.
Coe said the furore surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan´s Lin Yu-ting, who won Olympic gold medals in women´s boxing despite failing gender tests at last year´s world championships, left him "uncomfortable".
Boxing was a sport with "inherent dangers" which required crystal-clear guidelines from the top of the Olympic tree, he said. "I don´t think you can play fast and loose with a sport like boxing. You have to have clear policies as you do across all sports," Coe said, speaking after a World Athletics event launch in Budapest.
He added: "International federations are expecting that landscape to be created by the Olympic movement. It is a co-curation, if you like, but the thought leadership and the lead that needs to be taken does have to come through the Olympic movement.
"If we do not protect women´s sport and we don´t have a clear and unambiguous set of policies to do that, then we run the risk of losing women´s sport. "From a personal perspective, and as the president of an Olympic sport, I´m just not prepared for that to happen."
Four decades after he won his second Olympic 1,500m gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Coe remains one of the world´s best-known athletes. Why then does he want to trade the leadership of the sport he loves for the fraught politics of the IOC?
"I tend to think I´ve been in training for this role my whole life. In fact pretty much from the age of 11 when I first put a pair of running shoes on," he said. "I have a vision. Also critically, I do actually have a plan for what the next generation of the Olympic movement looks like. So, yes, I feel that I´m very well-equipped for that role."
He faces a formidable task to win. Some observers believe it is time for a woman to lead the Olympic movement for the first time and Zimbabwean former swimmer Kirsty Coventry is among the seven candidates. Coventry sits on the IOC´s powerful Executive Board but Coe, an IOC member since 2020, believes the Olympic movement could and should be better run.
