IOC presidential aspirant: 'We run risk of losing women's sport'

PARIS — World Athletics president Sebastian Coe has vowed to protect women's sport following the gender eligibility row at this year's Paris Games if he becomes head of the International Olympic Committee.

Coe told AFP in an interview that ensuring a clear set of policies around women's participation would be top of his in-tray if he is elected next March to succeed Thomas Bach.

The 68-year-old Briton also vowed to widen the decision-making process surrounding Russia's re-admission to the Olympics.

Coe said the furore surrounding Algerian boxer Imane Khelif and Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, who won Olympic gold medals in women's boxing despite failing gender tests at last year's world championships, left him "uncomfortable".

Boxing was a sport with "inherent dangers" which required crystal-clear guidelines from the top of the Olympic tree, he said.

"I don't think you can play fast and loose with a sport like boxing. You have to have clear policies as you do across all sports," Coe said, speaking after a World Athletics event launch in Budapest.

He added: "International federations are expecting that landscape to be created by the Olympic movement. It is a co-curation, if you like, but the thought leadership and the lead that needs to be taken does have to come through the Olympic movement.

"If we do not protect women's sport and we don't have a clear and unambiguous set of policies to do that, then we run the risk of losing women's sport.

"From a personal perspective, and as the president of an Olympic sport, I'm just not prepared for that to happen."

Four decades after he won his second Olympic 1,500m gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, Coe remains one of the world's best-known athletes.

Why then does he want to trade the leadership of the sport he loves for the fraught politics of the IOC?

"I tend to think I've been in training for this role my whole life. In fact pretty much from the age of 11 when I first put a pair of running shoes on," he said.

"I have a vision. Also critically, I do actually have a plan for what the next generation of the Olympic movement looks like. So, yes, I feel that I'm very well-equipped for that role."

He faces a formidable task to win.