As it fights for relevance, athletics needs a positive showing at World Championships in Doha

Coe will be hoping his sport is making headlines for the right reasons over the next ten days
Getty Images for IAAF
Matt Majendie @mattmajendie26 September 2019

When Seb Coe was this week elected to another four-year term as IAAF president, he was asked how he would like that second spell to be defined. The response, perhaps unsurprisingly, was for it “not to be dominated by Russia”.

But thanks to a fresh inquiry following reports that the data extracted from the Moscow laboratory by WADA investigators in January had been doctored or, in some cases, removed entirely, it is a headache that will not easily go away.

In recent weeks, reports have emerged of doping by athletes in Kenya, while Olympic hammer champion Dilshod Nazarov was yesterday ruled out of competing after his retested sample from the Rio Olympics produced a positive sample for the banned steroid turinabol.

In addition, the heir apparent to Usain Bolt, Christian Coleman, arrived at these World Championships having missed three drugs tests but avoided a ban thanks to his lawyers finding a legal loophole — plus one of his rivals for gold, Justin Gatlin, has reportedly been spotted in the company of disgraced coach Dennis Mitchell in Doha.

Coleman is favourite to win 100m gold, but has a reputation to rebuild 
Getty Images

But for Coe and athletics in the coming 10 days, drugs are not the only fight. As the sport battles for relevance in a crowded sporting market, it has made no secret of its desire to spread to other countries. Nonetheless, the choice of Qatar must be questioned.

The championships have been shifted from their traditional August date in the calendar to late September due to the climate, but temperatures are still expected to be in the low 30s, even at midnight when the respective marathons get under way.

And while ticket sales for the Khalifa International Stadium were never expected to go through the roof, according to reports they have been as low as 50,000 across the entire week and a half, with migrant workers and children likely to be shipped in to fill the empty seats.

The dwindling numbers have not been helped by the boycott of the other neighbouring gulf states, at one of the few opportunities outside the Olympic Games for athletics to properly be in the shop window.

And as a prelude to football’s World Cup in three years’ time, this may not necessarily prove to be the ideal sales pitch by a nation that is keen to nurture its global image amid question marks about the human rights of those aforementioned migrant workers.

Organisers will hope the star names can help to lift the championships when they get under way tomorrow, but two absentees arguably loom the largest. Usain Bolt is missing from a global event for the first time since his retirement in the wake of London 2017, and Caster Semenya opted not to take testosterone-suppressing medication in order to compete in Doha.

Whether the likes of Coleman and the American 200metre runner Noah Lyles can help to fill the Bolt void remains to be seen, but Coleman by his own admission has a reputation to rebuild. As he put it: “Once a situation like this happens, it’s hard to try to rebuild your reputation and have people not speculate.”

200m sprint star Noah Lyles could become one of the sport's post-Bolt era stars
Getty Images

From a British perspective, the team will be hoping to have properly filled its own void left by the retirements of Jessica Ennis-Hill and Greg Rutherford, and Mo Farah’s switch to road racing.

The good news is that in Dina Asher-Smith, Katarina Johnson-Thompson and Laura Muir, they have three potential world-beaters all aged 26 or under and yet to hit their peak as athletes.

Asher-Smith is attempting an unlikely but possible sprint double, while Johnson-Thompson is seeking to find a weakness in arguably the world’s greatest current female athlete, Nafi Thiam, and Muir is trying to overcome an injury which has sidelined her since July.

It is those talking points that Coe would rather be focusing on in the coming days in Doha.

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