World Athletics President Sebastian Coe in Budapest (© Getty Images)
World Athletics President Sebastian Coe explains why athletes were at the forefront of the thinking for the inaugural Ultimate Championship
If someone had approached me with the concept of the Ultimate when I was an athlete, I would have leapt at the opportunity and that’s because of the head to heads.
I love racing and particularly racing when it matters. In a championship year when you wake up on 1 January, you just wake up feeling a little bit different – it’s like, “this is serious”. The championships are the business end of the season. This year that’s the Ultimate, and that’s a little bit different, too.
We will see Olympic champions, we will see world champions, we will see the newly crowned Diamond League champions, newly minted world record-holders. They’re all hungry to compete and I know that because I’ve spoken to so many of them. This is about the best of the best, and I love that.
It's been my mantra from the early days as a competitor through to right now being World Athletics President, that it always has to be about the athletes.
You have to bring the lens of the athlete into all the big decisions – they’re our crucial asset. And I wake up every day trying to remind myself that the decisions we make have to be for the athlete and, if you have them as your North Star, you won’t go far wrong.
I'm so bored listening to people in sport saying we’re an athlete-centric organisation, but what does that actually mean? We have got to go beyond simply saying that and meaning that to listen to them, but also graduate to us becoming commercial partners with our athletes.
We’ve spoken to our athletes and what they’ve told us is don’t compromise. If you're going to do this differently, properly do it differently. We have looked at different things and we have listened to the athletes over that, and there are some things we’ve adapted according to their feedback.
I heard Josh Kerr saying, “this is an event that is needed,” and that’s a good thing. But crucially, this has got to look different and feel different.
I want the athletes to walk away at the end of it all and think “this felt different”. Athletes are understandably cautious when they hear federations saying they’re going to do this or that. I want them to feel comforted at the end of this, to think we did everything in our power to do something different and valuable.
We’re using the skill, amplification and ability to communicate of some of our athletes as Ultimate Stars. We’ve had Noah Lyles being interviewed on NBC about it and we have Melissa Jefferson-Wooden driving the Kids' Athletics programme.
And then we have Mondo Duplantis having written and performed the anthem, but individually and collectively they’re all showing their other dimensions well beyond them as an athlete, whether they be fashion, music or whatever it is.
It's taken a lot of Herculean work on behalf of a lot of people and this is the third year we’ve been working on the Ultimate. Central to our thinking on it has always been athlete welfare. We talk about the physical side of that and also the mental side but there’s a critical third pillar which people don’t tend to link to the other two, and that is financial security.
If you haven’t got financial security for athletes, you must do everything you possibly can to professionalise the sport and put more money into the pockets of the athletes. They won’t stay in the sport as long as you want them to, they're not going to train optimally, they’re probably going to be cutting corners when it comes to health and science, and you're also going to put them under undue stresses. That can be physical or mental and again financial when they’re the main breadwinner at home.
The Ultimate has a prize pot of US$10million, the individual winners will go home with $150,000, and I’m very proud of that. It’s the sort of payday our athletes work so hard for and deserve.
This is a new event and, sure, not everything we try is going to pass the first road test but that's okay. I'd much rather people wake up on the Monday after the Ultimate saying, “Yeah, they gave it a real go,” even if not everything clicked. I’d far rather that than we played it safe.
But we’re confident in what we’re doing and the birth of the Ultimate, putting athletes first but also being an incubator for change, hopefully in the future changing our own World Championships with the different innovations we have in Budapest.
We want this to be the start of an innovative journey through every aspect of our sport. It’s been an event created with and by the fans, and with and by the athletes. This is an extraordinary event that has huge potential.
