Sebastian Coe has warned that London’s bid for the 2029 World Athletics Championships could be scuppered by West Ham’s refusal to allow their stadium to be used in September.
World Athletics has made it clear to bidding cities, which the Guardian understands also includes Rome, Munich and Nairobi as well as a mooted Indian city, that the world championships should be the grand finale to the athletics season.
However West Ham are so far refusing to vacate their stadium for around three weeks in September, despite the London bid having the strong backing of the government and the mayor’s office.
“It’s really difficult for me because I have a view, but I have to be scrupulously neutral, because London is clearly not the only bid out there,” said Lord Coe. “All I would say is that I would hope that there is a recognition that outside the Olympic Games and the World Cup, this is the third-largest sporting gathering in a four-year cycle.
“I do ask cities to try to accommodate us. There has to be a recognition that it’s a big global sport. This is not a gimme to anyone.”
This month West Ham told the Daily Mail that it had a “contractual right ensuring West Ham United games take priority during the football season” and has so far shown no indication of budging. The fear in track and field circles is that, as a result, the club is holding London’s bid to ransom – for now at least.
Asked whether West Ham should be more welcoming to athletics, given it received one of the bargains of the century when it got the London 2012 Olympic Stadium almost for free, Coe replied: “I’ve sat on the board of one Premier League club, and I’m very close to another one, and I think they would have been pretty satisfied with that deal.”
Coe also downplayed the chances of the 2029 World Athletics Championships being staged earlier in the summer so that it missed the start of the football season.
“I can’t speculate about that,” he said. “That would then be a council judgment. We have a pretty clear, stated position that we want our world championships to finish as the conclusion of a season.
“Why did we do that? Well, the reason is that, for a lot of our fans, it was confusing. They didn’t quite know why somebody would come out of a world championships or an Olympic Games and then go: ‘OK, I know they won whatever it is, in the world championships, and then four days later they’re in the Diamond League final.’
“And particularly when you have a very cluttered sporting calendar across winter and summer sports, we just felt we needed to do everything just to make our sport a little more understandable.”
The initial deadline for bids for both the 2029 and 2031 world championships is 3 April, although final submissions are not required until 5 August. The announcement of the winning cities will be made in September.