Lord Coe has warned that climate change will reorder the sporting calendar and remains open-minded about a potential Saudi Arabian bid to host the 2040 Olympic Games in the winter or autumn.
With only 11 days until the vote for president of the International Olympic Committee, Coe said that he was feeling “momentum” in his campaign and delivered a message both of change and working with all corners of the world, including the newly elected US president Donald Trump.
Coe has long argued that climate change is already certain to force a change to the sporting calendar and is now predicting shifts to the traditional summer Olympic schedule, particularly in outdoor endurance events.
Of a Saudi Arabian summer Olympic bid – and the prospect of hosting the Games in the winter of 2040 – Coe said: “By then we’re going to have to have had a readjustment of the global calendar anyway. That is the one thing I know we’re going to have to address and we should have done it earlier.”
“Climate change. If you think about a World Athletics Championships, can we for very much longer ask athletes, even in Budapest or Paris if there’s a championships, to be running in August? No. It doesn’t work.
“We had a [football] World Cup in Qatar which actually arguably was the most successful. If you remember in Qatar, we actually had our [athletics] World Championships. That went well into October and actually if you look at those World Championships, in terms of athlete performance, they were the best ever.”
‘We’ve got to be even-handed’
Coe also confirmed that Diamond League athletics could be among the next big sporting events to be hosted in Saudi Arabia and, asked if sports-washing was a valid term, he said: “I don’t really. I really don’t. I mean, look, let’s be open about it. To a greater or lesser degree, everybody does that. You want to show the best of your country. You do need to look behind the scenes.
“Some of those countries have got actually a much more coherent policy towards sport, using sport to create better opportunities for movement, physicality, young people, than many of those countries sitting there saying, ‘Oh well, of course it’s sportswashing’, while they’re watching school sport disappear and sport slowly drift off government agendas. We’ve got to be a little more even handed here.”
Coe also revealed he will seek urgent talks with tech giants Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to tackle social media abuse of female athletes by “pondlife” trollers.
But, at the end of a week when British athletes Eilish McColgan and Georgie Hunter Bell have highlighted the dark side of social media, Coe was particularly forthright on the need to better protect female athletes. The Women’s Tennis Association called on social media companies to crackdown on threatening online behaviour after Emma Raducanu was recently brought to tears during a match by a stalker and Coe also now wants action. “We’ve got to do a whole heap more – I’ve seen the distraught, the distress this has caused,” he said of social media abuse. “Some of the stuff that the American shot-putter Raven Saunders talked to me about … you just wanted to cry listening to it.”
Musk owns the social media platform X while Zuckerburg’s Meta company operates Instagram, Facebook, Threads and WhatsApp. Asked for his message to the tech giants, Coe said: “Sort this out. Help us sort this out. It’s just unacceptable. Someone wins a gold medal - the last thing they want to do is have that soured by messages they’ve got on their phone. There’s a huge element of social media that’s actually an act of cowardice.
“It’s vital that women feel that our sport is a safe space. You cannot have young athletes thinking, ‘The second you get public exposure, this comes at you like a waterfall of horror’. It’s pondlife. We should be angry. It’s not enough for people to say, ‘Just don’t look at your phone’. AI actually can really help here. We’ve just got to get on with it and utilise it properly.”
Should he win the IOC presidency, Coe will also find himself working closely with organisers of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and by extension President Trump, who is promising the “greatest Games” in the final months of his term. “The Games is bigger than any individual,” said Coe. I remember the Games were opened in 1984 by Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t uniformly a deep joy about some of the things that Ronald Reagan was doing. I can’t believe that, like any other American President, he won’t want these games to be a huge success.” Under Coe’s leadership, World Athletics has suspended the Russian team from major international competition over both doping and then the invasion of Ukraine but he says that a ceasefire could change the approach.
“You make judgements on what the circumstances are,” said Coe. “If that is an arrangement that gets met and agreed by both sides, then you would obviously have to review that situation.”
