Opinion | The world has changed and World Athletics needs to keep up in order to survive
- My experiences as an athlete at World Championships were not as much fun as they have been as president, now we need to modernise our sport
My competitive experiences of World Championships have been abysmal. I was injured for the first one, injured for the second one, and was retired by 1991 in Tokyo. So I did not actually compete in a World Championships. But I am fully making up for these omissions now.
Budapest was a very special World Championships because it was the 40th anniversary of the first one in 1983 in Helsinki, and it was also the first one that gave me the opportunity from the outset to decide what it should look like.
I became president of World Athletics in 2015, and it is inevitable that any incoming president inherits already chosen, existing World Championships. Budapest was the first that I could say was mine.
The No 1 requisite was simple. I did not want an empty stadium. It makes our sport look marginal unless there are noisy, passionate, knowledgeable fans in the theatre. And that is what we had. We sold tickets to well over 100 countries. In 1983 there were about 1,300 athletes from 150 countries. This year we had almost 2100 from 197 countries. The field was really strong. Everywhere you look, everybody performed at the very highest level.
As president, I have to be balanced and fair, but I am always going to drift towards middle distance running and I must say how much I loved the season Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon has had. The first woman to break 3 mins 50 secs for the 1500 metres; a week later in the Diamond League in Paris, she broke the 5000 metres record.
She left Budapest with gold medals from an extraordinarily difficult double, the 1500 and the 5000 metres. Very few have achieved it. So, for me she is the female performer of the year. As a Laureus Academy Member, I will be watching to see if she is nominated for the 2024 Laureus World Sports Awards in the New Year.
