No reason to axe shotput from Olympics, says presidency candidate

Sebastian Coe with children taking part in an IAAF kids' athletic event at the Millennium Institute on the North Shore yesterday. He is in New Zealand to meet athletes and administrators. Picture / Nick Reed

Double Olympic champion and IAAF presidential hopeful Sebastian Coe has quelled fears shotput may be axed from the Olympic programme after 2020.

Lord Coe, the former chairman of the London Olympic and Paralympic organising committee and current IAAF vice-president, is in New Zealand as part of a wider mission to understand the challenges facing athletics around the world as he chases appointment to the top job in August this year. During yesterday's whistlestop tour Lord Coe met some of the country's key influencers in sport including the New Zealand Olympic Committee and High Performance Sport NZ as well as Prime Minister John Key.

Having declared his candidacy for the presidency of the IAAF, Lord Coe also met Athletics NZ and a number of athletes including fellow double Olympic champion Valerie Adams.

One of the big issues on the Athletics NZ agenda was likely to be the proposed changes to the Olympic programme, with shotput one of the five track and field events thought to be under threat by the IOC's radical plans to modernise the Games.

With Adams' success on the world stage the key pillar propping athletics up in this country and paving the way for more world-class talent in Tom Walsh and Jacko Gill, Kiwi concerns about cutting the event are obvious.

Lord Coe said if he were to be elected to lead world athletics' governing body, it would be for the sport to decide what events would be included at the Olympics, adding: "I see no good reason why the sport would want to get rid of shotput.

"It's not about jettisoning our history and traditions and saying 'well race-walking has got to go and shotput has to go because their moment may have been' - that's a decision for the sport to take.

"Before we make those decisions and if we are wanting to shape the sport in a way that captures the imagination of young people, we've got to spend a great deal more time understanding young people."

Making athletics relevant to young people and recognising that sport is now largely in the entertainment business is the key to "making people fall in love with our sport again", Lord Coe believes.

"It's the sport's responsibility to explain much more about athletics and maybe for younger people, that athletics contains all the physical literacies that you're going to need in virtually any sport barring swimming - unless it goes horribly wrong in the steeplechase," he joked.

While Lord Coe is facing strong competition for the IAAF presidency from Olympic pole vault gold medallist Sergey Bubka in the election, he said he was not seeking any assurances that Athletics NZ would vote for him in August.

"With track and field we have five continents with massively varying challenges and I don't think you can possibly say, 'Well, I'm standing for office, I want to represent 213 federations,' without taking the time and effort and energy to meet with those federations and actually understand first hand how they are delivering the sport."