In mid-April, Sebastian Coe met with Le Monde in Monaco, at the headquarters of World Athletics, the international athletics federation, which he has chaired since 2015. At the reception desk, a Ukrainian flag with an inscription written in felt-tip pen: "Thank you World Athletics! Team Ukraine."
"They gave it to me at the Budapest Worlds [in August 2023]," recalled Coe, who decided in February 2022 to exclude Russian athletes from the discipline's competitions.
This is a position he has consistently maintained ever since. "It wasn't about passports or politics, it was about the integrity of the sport," insisted the two-time Olympic 1,500-meter gold medallist (1980 and 1984), who was also patron of the London 2012 Games and joined the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2020.
Throughout your career, as a sportsman and then as a leader, Russia has been a regular source of tension. In Moscow in 1980, you took part in your first Olympic Games, despite Margaret Thatcher's call for a boycott following the USSR's 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. What memories do you have of the Games?
For many months, nobody was really sure whether we would be going to Moscow or not. The British Olympic Association, which I became president of for a few years, was very strong and independent. It said, no, it's for individual federations to decide. And then of course, getting to the games was in itself a different experience because British government didn't help in any way at all. So there was no embassy support. There were no national anthems, no flags. And we competed as a British team, but without any of the protocols.
Why did I choose to go? Because the British government's only response to the invasion of Afghanistan was in the field of sport. Nobody in the commercial sector, nobody in the cultural sector or heritage or politically were being asked to make any sacrifice at all. It was just sport. And there was one week when I remember particularly and that reinforced my view. And that was when I think the Bolshoi Ballet arrived in London and British Petroleum signed a pipe deal with Russia. And I thought, this is beyond hypocritical. It would have been a tougher decision had other sectors of society been having to confront the same challenge, but they weren't. And it made me recognize that actually, the government didn't value sport. They liked to welcome winning teams and individuals back to Downing Street. But when it actually came to substantive structural support for sport, it really wasn't there.
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