Sebastian Coe promised to be ‘guided by science’ when it comes to sport’s most divisive issue. But World Athletics’ solution is clearly designed to protect it from legal action tooNo female athlete has yet commented. Can you blame them given the vicious amount of social media abuse this issue generates? During a star-spangled athletics career, Sebastian Coe rarely snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The most famous exception came at the Olympic 800m final in Moscow where he made so many tactical missteps that his father and coach, Peter, used a coarse four-letter word to describe his run. However this weekend Coe became reacquainted with similar levels of opprobrium after World Athletics’ proposed solution to sport’s most divisive issue...
The 2012 Games were over budget while existing stadiums like Crystal Palace have been allowed to become dilapidated relicsThis summer marks the 10th anniversary of the London 2012 Olympic Games. It is customary here to suggest that decade has simply flown by, that the years have passed in a blink. In reality this already feels like an event from a different timeline altogether.It’s not the actual Games, which will remain a wonderful thing, tenderly guarded. It’s more the staging. Looking back there is something jarring about the uniformly joyful and empowered response to the opening ceremony, with its ragbag of nostalgia and self-mythologising. Kenneth Branagh pretending to be Brunel. Musical Youth playing croquet. Roger Moore inside a phone box surfing...
Events such as the raucous Night of the 10,000m PBs show there is an appetite for live athletics – but more can be doneAt the start of another sporting weekend dominated by football Maro Itoje gave an interview which sounded like a cri de coeur. Rugby, the England flanker warned, needed to do more to grow its game, to market itself better against more media‑savvy sports and to engage with those outside its “stereotypical” world. “Rugby is very good at speaking to its own market, at preaching to the choir,” he told the Mirror. “There’s an awful lot of room for improvement. There’s no way you can tell me Formula One is more exciting than rugby. Yet it’s definitely packaged...
The convicted super criminal’s death could lead to a series of revelations with his son dropping hints of other scandalsChampion long jumper. Coach of the Senegal national football team. Mayor of Dakar. Head of global athletics for 16 years and hailed as a spiritual leader by Seb Coe. Olympic powerbroker. Fixer. Corruptor. Convicted super criminal. Lamine Diack packed a lot into his extraordinary 88 years, which came to a quiet end on Friday. Yet we are perhaps still nowhere close to knowing all of his felonies – and the friends he helped along the way.True, what we know is staggering enough. Last year Diack received a four-year sentence from the French courts for masterminding a scheme in which the IAAF,...
Next year’s Games in Birmingham will likely be the last on such a grand scale and some changes to safeguard the event’s future smack of genuine desperationIt’s nine months until the start of the XXII Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, which also means it’s four years and nine months till the start of the XXIII Commonwealth Games in, well, nobody knows. The Commonwealth Games Federation was due to announce the host city for 2026 in September 2019, but the decision was postponed until 2020, and then again to 2021, and has just been pushed back again until 2022. The CGF says it expects to make an announcement in March. At the moment there’s not a single confirmed bid.The CGF president, Dame...