Athletics makes strides to tap into public health agenda
With more people trying to keep fit during the coronavirus pandemic, World Athletics has been keen to tap into this surge in recreational running and walking. The global governing body struck up a partnership with parkrun in 2020 and Seb Coe says building such relationships is an ongoing goal.
"During the first lockdown during the pandemic there was a massive, massive surge in exercise and most of that manifested itself around running and walking," he explained, talking during a video interview with AW this week. "This is a massive asset for us (as a sport) to have."
He continued: "Athletics is the most accessible sport. It’s probably the most democratic sport you can find too. If you have governments who are finally beginning to turn their attention to believing that not everything that they’re dealing with is going to be resolved by national health services but instead by a multi disciplinary approach, then this is a space that we are pre-eminently best placed to help them with."
Coe adds: "In order to grow our sport we need to focus on more commercial partners but we also need to build better and closer relationships with what I’d describe as the public sector and certainly position ourselves as the sport that is better placed than any other sport to meet those local, regional, national and international health agendas.
"We’ve done that so far in a number of ways and we’ll continue to do that in dialogue with the world health organisations and governments at every level."
How does World Athletics go about creating links with the No.1 Olympic sport and ordinary people who just want to keep fit?
Coe explains: "My federations will tell you that there’s never a visit that I make to see them where I’m not telling them what I need is not just to sit down with the sports minister or the leading lights in their sport but I need to sit down with health and education ministers and ideally the political leaders of their country to make the point that we are here and we can support their programmes.
"And already we’ve developed great relationships around the world with governments who now see our sport as being a really important part of that."
Coe says creating links with recreational running and people wanting to keep fit is something modern athletics governing bodies should be doing too.
"We’ve looked at the 2013-14 nations that make up World Athletics and recognised that not every one of those federations is going to be delivering elite teams for world championships but that doesn’t stop them still being at the forefront at their local and national levels of helping us build that platform of participation and health engagement," he says.
"So every morning when a federation wakes up I don’t want them to feel they’re only worthy of being a federation if they are delivering athletes to a world championships. There is a much broader basis for the delivery of our sport across all these sub-sets and we will continue to empower them so we can build a grassroots presence and footfall in the sport."
(Photograph by Mark Shearman)
