Sebastian Coe hails athletics talent emerging since Usain Bolt, says he feels his most optimistic in 30 years
- ‘You don’t replace Usain Bolt,’ Coe says at Laureus World Sports Awards, but he believes there is a ‘broader bandwidth of talent now’
- Track and field’s global chief adds that performance is not enough and social media offers scope to push the sport’s personalities to larger audiences
Sebastian Coe, the head of World Athletics, has said he is more confident about the future of the sport than at any time in the past 30 years.
Fifteen months out from the 2024 Paris Olympics, the governing body’s president said there was no shortage of stars, male or female, even if the loss of the retired Usain Bolt was still being felt.
While the next generation has yet to truly match the Jamaican sprinter’s charisma on or off the track, Coe, twice an Olympic gold medallist at 1500 metres, said the “quality of talent coming through” left him more optimistic “than at any time, certainly in the time I’ve been president and at any time in the last 20 or 30 years”.
Speaking in Paris at the Laureus World Sports Awards earlier this week, Coe also said that he expected the Olympics next year to “be fantastic” and with track and field “indisputably the No 1 Olympic sport now, both in thought, leadership, and in performance”.
“Yes, Usain Bolt is a massive figure – you don’t replace Usain Bolt, you don’t replace Muhammad Ali,” Coe said. “But after Muhammad Ali were great boxers [even if] they weren’t Muhammad Ali. There’s no shortage of talent.”
Pointing to last year’s World Championships in the United States, Coe highlighted the fact that a quarter of those taking part were under the age of 25, and cited the example of Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson, who took silver in the 800m having also done so at the Tokyo Olympics the year before as a 19-year-old.