President of World Athletics talks about the Ultimate Championship on the eve of the action kicking off in Budapest.

Seb Coe has moved to distance the World Athletics Ultimate Championship from the well-documented financial troubles of the Grand Slam Track League, insisting the new event is built on entirely different foundations as it prepares to launch in Budapest on Friday.

Asked directly about athletes who had "had their fingers burnt" by Grand Slam Track's collapse, the World Athletics president was unequivocal. "I'm sorry, I think that's a bit of an outlier," he said.

Coe pointed to years of preparation behind the Ultimate Championship as evidence it would not suffer the same fate. "We have a business. We have a fully-funded business plan. We have a city with all the guarantees in place," he said, days out from the event's opening session. "I can guarantee you the athletes will be paid on time."

He said the governing body had spent a decade building the financial and structural foundations that made outside investment in the sport possible in the first place. "If we're being open about it, I wouldn't have invested in our sport 10 years ago," he admitted. "We didn't have any of the governance in place that we now have. We had none of the structures in place. We had an organisation that, frankly, wasn't really fit for purpose. We now do."

That, he said, was precisely why any new entrant into the sport needed more than ambition. "Whatever comes to the table has to have a plan A and a bulletproof plan B, and that has to be around the financial security and the experience and expertise to actually deliver a complicated sport," he said. "The thought that you are going to be able to do that in two or three months' notice without broadcasters and no business plan is delusional. We've been working on this now for three years."

Coe was careful to manage expectations for the inaugural edition. "Not everything that we probably hope for will be delivered. We have to be realistic about that. This is the first one, and I think it'll work, and there'll be lots of lessons that we take from that" for future editions, he said, adding that he hopes the event can serve as "an incubator" for ideas that could eventually be brought into the World Championships itself, to help attract "newer and younger audiences."

On the origins of the "best of the best" concept, Coe said it grew from a recognition that the sport's four-year championship cycle leaves gaps. "The reality of it is that we can't afford as a sport not to have one big broadcast moment at a decent time of the year where you've got a billion people watching," he said, adding that adding another World Championships into the calendar's quiet year would have been "the easy option." Instead, he said he worked on the concept with World Athletics chief executive Jon Ridgeon, with whom he shares a background in event innovation dating back to the pair's work with Fast Track in the 1990s.

Ticket sales, Coe said, are already tracking well ahead of the opening night. "We'll have full houses on the three three-hour sessions," he said, with 20,000 tickets available for each of the three evenings.

He said the promotional strategy in the final weeks had focused on countries within driving distance of Budapest with strong existing athletics followings, including Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany — echoing the approach taken for the World Championships held in the Hungarian capital in 2023.

On the format, he said: "On the track it's 16 and three wildcards — the reigning Olympic champion, reigning world champion, and the winner of the Diamond League this year."

He added that he was relaxed about the possibility of fields being dominated by athletes from the same nation should qualification work out that way. "If we have four or five US sprinters, or four or five Jamaicans, or four Kenyans, so be it. I think it'll be an interesting format."

On the $10 million prize pot, Coe was blunt about its significance. "Nobody leaves without something," he said. "$10 million is not chopped liver."