As the battle to become IOC President enters the final days, Duncan Mackay assesses the chances of Sebastian Coe, the man in charge of World Athletics, being able to prove his doubters wrong once again
Sebastian Coe has stood in enough elections in his life to know that you have to expect the unexpected. But he will surely never experience anything again as surreal as he did during the 2001 UK general election, when he was on the stump canvassing for votes and he ended up fighting on the street with a man dressed as a clown.
A British tabloid newspaper had come up with the idea of sending “Krusty” to whichever constituency that Coe’s boss and former Conservative Party leader William Hague was campaigning in with the aim of getting a photograph of the two together with the purpose of being able to snatch a picture which would allow them to pose the question: “Which one’s the clown?”
Coe had been given the job of making sure that this picture opportunity never happened. After a couple of weeks, things came to a head in Chichester when arguably Britain’s greatest athlete found himself trading punches with a man dressed in a green wig, sporting a luminous red nose and wearing oversized shoes.
Now 24 years on, Coe is engaged in a quite different kind of election and one where he is canvassing to a quite different electorate. The campaign to be elected only the tenth President of the International Olympic Committee since it was founded in 1894 is, on the surface, a much more genteel affair.
“In this campaign I certainly don’t get my son asking: ‘Dad. Why were you hitting a clown?’,” Coe told AW. “I finished with my shirt and jacket ripped that day. A general election is obviously more public. In a street campaign it can get hairy. And you don’t get voters in the IOC saying they are not voting for you and telling you to get stuffed.”
Earlier this year, as Coe cruised through the lobby of a five-star hotel in Lausanne packed with international sports officials, billionaires, entrepreneurs, royalty, top politicians and even an Oscar-winning actress, the contrast with punch-ups in Chichester and wet days on the campaign trail in Preston could not have been more striking.
But the essence of the job is basically the same – securing enough votes from the 109 IOC members drawn from all over the world to win the election in Greece on March 20.
The gathering in Lausanne at the end of January was Coe’s only opportunity to get to meet the electorate in one place before the election, press the flesh and sell his vision of how he thinks the organisation which wields more power in sport than any other should look in the 21st century.
The election is taking place amid strict rules about what candidates can and cannot do. Everything is being conducted in the utmost secrecy. Privately, Coe doesn’t agree with it. Publicly, he says: “You have to follow the rules.”
Coe, a former Government Whip, is well versed at the complex arithmetic of counting prospective votes. He has been travelling the world since he officially confirmed last September that he was standing for the role and has been discreetly lobbying anyone who has a vote, trying to persuade them that he is the man who can lead them forward in a period of growing geopolitical tensions.
The key to success is avoiding too much of a hard sell on IOC members. Stroking egos and pushing the right emotional buttons is crucial. Unlike in a general election, the one question Coe cannot ask is: “Have we got your vote?” IOC members are notoriously secretive about their voting plans and it is considered bad manners to even ask.
But Coe’s team somehow have to work out the numbers in the most competitive contest in history, featuring seven candidates with no clearcut favourite. An encouraging word here or friendly smile there is often enough to be taken as a sign of support. “In a Whip’s office your raison d’être is to make sure there are no surprises,” Coe said. “It is like that. You have to know what is being spoken about in the coffee house. You have to follow the nuances.”
Seb Coe (Mark Shearman)
Following a modest career as an MP, Coe has discovered his true calling and few people in world sport understand how this works better than him. He went through the exact same thing 20 years ago when he successfully led the bid from London 2012 to bring the Olympic Games back to the city for the first time in 64 years. London started that race considered to be the outsiders behind Paris and were largely written off. But now, just as then, there is a growing feeling that Coe is gathering momentum the closer the finish line gets.
He is 68 now but remains as driven as when he was in his prime on the track, winning back-to-back Olympic gold medals and setting 12 world records. Wherever he is in the world, he still runs most mornings before he does anything else and covers up to 30 miles a week, which he still records in the training diaries he has kept since he was a teenager.
Running for IOC President requires a different kind of preparation. “I will work harder for this than I’ll probably ever work for anything,” Coe said when he launched his manifesto last December. “It’s the dance that I just couldn’t sit out.”
Coe faces competition for the role from Spaniard Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, France’s David Lappartient, Zimbabwe’s Kirsty Coventry, Japan’s Morinari Watanabe, British-Swede Johan Eliasch and Prince Feisal al Hussein of Jordan.
Current IOC President Thomas Bach, who had been first elected in 2013, announced during the Olympics in Paris last July that he intended to stand down after the end of his second term this year.
Coe quickly emerged as part of a lead group also containing Coventry and Samaranch. Coventry, a seven-time Olympic swimming medallist, is bidding to become the first woman and African to head the IOC. Samaranch is one of four current IOC vice-presidents and whose late father was in charge of the IOC for 21 years until 2001.
Coe has claimed Olympic sport is “fundamental to my DNA” and that “a laser-like focus on sport must be the priority for the IOC. I believe I can help achieve this and more.” But, out of the three favourites, he started out considered the most unlikely to win, even though he is probably the best qualified candidate for IOC President in history.
Seb Coe (Getty)
He is the only one ever to have won an Olympic gold medal, chaired the organising committee of an Olympic Games, served as head of a National Olympic Committee, having led the British Olympic Association between 2012 and 2016 and been President of an international federation.
The image that Coe has – unfairly – is of someone who has been handed everything on a silver plate. Both his Olympic gold medals were achieved against the odds – first at Moscow 1980 when he bounced back from a shock defeat in the 800m to main rival Steve Ovett to claim the 1500m and then, four years later in Los Angeles, when written off by the British media who had campaigned for Peter Elliott to go instead, he retained the title. That led to him walking round the track in the LA Memorial Coliseum with one finger pointed in the air while screaming in the direction of the press box: “Who says I’m f***ing finished now?”
It was Coe’s aura that rescued London’s faltering Olympic campaign and propelled it to a brilliant victory but it is largely forgotten now that, when the original bid committee was drawn up under Tony Blair’s Labour Government, Coe was not part of it. In the end, it took some intense lobbying from the same British media that had once written him off that finally saw him given a role. I can still remember in 2003, along with colleagues Neil Wilson from The Daily Mail, and Colin Hart, of The Sun, pinning the then Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell in the corner of the old press room at Crystal Palace and telling her that Coe needed to be included in the bid.
“I’ve never had a problem with being an underdog,” Coe said. “Lots of underdogs come through very well.”
Seb Coe (Getty)
Coe’s biggest opponent this time may not be Coventry or Samaranch, but Bach. The German and Coe used to be close friends. In 1980, both were selected by the then IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch for the first IOC Athletes’ Commission. They even had nicknames for each other: Coe called Bach the “Professor” and Bach called Coe “Shakespeare”. When Coe gave the first speech by an athlete to the Olympic Congress at Baden-Baden in 1981 Bach, just winding down a successful fencing career at the time, helped him write it.
Cracks in their relationship began appearing shortly after Coe was elected the President of the International Association of Athletics Federations (later rebranded as World Athletics) in 2015 just as the extent of the doping scandal in Russia began to emerge.
Coe’s response on how to deal with it was much harsher than Bach’s at the IOC as he tried to maintain his good relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Then, when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Coe was again much stronger as World Athletics banned Russia from all of its events until the war ended. The IOC, in contrast, tried to produce a scheme which allowed some form of Russian representation at the Olympics.
Also, before the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo – which took place a year later because of the COVID pandemic – the two also clashed over the right of athletes to protest publicly on the medal podium. When Tommie Smith, Peter Norman and John Carlos were chosen to receive the World Athletics President’s award in recognition of their protest for Black rights at Mexico City 1968, Bach responded by claiming that Coe had broken his federation’s own rule on “political and religious marketing”.
Coe has insisted that he still considers Bach a friend, but any traces of a relationship have long since evaporated. There is now outright hatred on the part of Bach. At the start of the campaign, Bach was heavily supporting Coventry, even ringing up IOC members to tell them to vote for a woman who, as Sports Minister, is a leading member of a Zimbabwean Government ranked 149th out of 180 countries in “On Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index”.
As Coventry’s chances have faded, Bach has adopted a new approach. He is now contacting IOC members to warn them what a disaster Coe would be if he were elected as the next IOC President. Among the criticisms are that Coe is “arrogant” and “someone who doesn’t listen” – which sound like a pretty accurate description of Bach himself.
Under Bach, being an IOC member has largely become a symbolic position with all the major decisions, including which cities will host the Olympic Games, taken by a small coterie handpicked by him. Coe has promised to “free up the voices of the [IOC] membership”.
“There’s no shortage of talent [among the membership],” he said. “But the question I ask myself as a member is – what input do I and other members have? And the reality of it is, there isn’t enough. There’s too much power in the hands of too few people.”
Coe, McKean and Cram in 1986 (Mark Shearman)
Coe has wisely avoided getting involved publicly in the dispute with Bach and concentrated instead on making sure his message travels everywhere. He has been determined to stick to his guiding principle that “if you get it right for the athletes, you’re going to get 80 per cent of it right” and his belief that his sometimes contrarian ways will not necessarily be a dealbreaker for him in the election.
“A lot of the criticism I’ve gotten from people in the sporting world, which I found a little depressing, was the assumption that good politics is about basically playing safe and … not leaving the herd and sometimes taking risks,” Coe said. “And bad politics is doing just that.
“You just have to accept that not everyone’s going to see the world in the same way. Your job is to try to persuade them that that’s a direction you’d like them to come. You then put structures in place where they see the benefits of what we’re trying to achieve.”
A clear example of this is Coe’s insistence on bringing clarity to the issue of eligibility for transgender athletes and those born with differences of sexual development, known as DSD, which has been criticised within international sport but earned widespread praise among the majority of the public. Coe has even been happy to align himself with United States President Donald Trump on the issue as he believes it is a move to “protect the integrity of women’s sport”.
In his manifesto, Coe has vowed to “protect and promote the integrity of women’s sport” because it is “at a critical juncture”.
He added: “I will advocate for clear, science-based policies that safeguard the female category. We will work closely with world-leading medical and educational institutions to increase research into female health, performance and exercise physiology. We must navigate this with sensitivity and resolve to ensure current and future generations of women choose sport.”
Coe’s decision to break ranks with other Olympic sports and unilaterally pay bonuses to gold medallists in athletics at Paris 2024 also upset many inside the IOC, but he is unapologetic.
“We made the judgement about prize money because we felt it was in the best interest of our sport,” Coe said. “In hindsight, I should have done it differently, and I am ready to hold my hands up. I did apologise [to other Olympic sports federations]. Not about the prize money … but in hindsight I would have done it a different way.”
Coe claimed he has always been prepared to put his principles before anything else, something he attributes to his strong family upbringing. “I’d rather face the wrath of Margaret Thatcher than the wrath of my mother sitting around the dining room table saying to me ‘Are you demented?’ I have always tended to stand my ground on things I truly believe in.”
In fact, Coe did once face the wrath of the Iron Lady. The cold war was at its height when Thatcher was elected Prime Minister and US President Jimmy Carter called for a boycott of Moscow 1980 after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and she supported him.
Coe announced that he intended to compete in Moscow. It was a brave act of defiance from someone who, even then, harboured ambitions to become a Conservative MP. “It did cross my mind not to go,” he admitted. “As history has shown, I think I was right and they got it wrong.”
That trip to Moscow was the beginning of Coe’s long Olympic journey, one which has scaled the highest of highs but is not over yet. A final push towards more history beckons. As generations of athletes, sports officials, politicians and clowns have found out, you write Sebastian Newbold Coe off at your peril. Even Krusty will probably have a little chuckle to himself if Coe becomes the most powerful man in world sport.
This feature first appeared in the March issue of AW magazine.
Duncan Mackay is the former athletics and Olympics correspondent of The Guardian and The Observer. He founded and edited the world’s leading independent Olympics website insidethegames. Mackay now edits the Zeus Files, a newsletter dedicated to covering the Olympic Movement.
