Central contracts for world’s best athletes• Lord Coe backs biggest shake-up in athletics history
• Future to be decided in Monaco this week
Digg it Anna Kessel
The Observer, Sunday 1 March 2009
Article history
The new league system will see the likes of Usain Bolt competing in many more head-to-head events. Photograph: Dan Chung/Guardian
Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell and many more of the world’s top athletes will be offered central contracts to compete in a new world league of athletics that is set to be officially sanctioned by the sport’s governing body, the IAAF. Two meetings in Monaco, today and tomorrow, will determine the extent of the biggest shake-up in athletics history.
Sebastian Coe and his fellow vice-presidents of the IAAF will sit down with the body’s president, Lamine Diack, today to discuss plans for the proposed Diamond League, a global series of 12 meetings, running from May to September in three continents from next year. Diack is likely to be offered the chairmanship of the new league and is said to be accepting of the need for reform.
The idea came from a group of top athletics promoters headed by Patrick Magyar, director of the Weltklasse Zürich meeting and a sports marketing guru, who has led negotiations between the league promoters and the IAAF. Magyar declined to make an official comment on the negotiations, but confirmed that an announcement from the IAAF was expected this week. The promoters are willing to work with the ruling body and gain their sanction rather than go their own way by revamping the existing Golden League events in Europe. The promoters and the IAAF will meet tomorrow to thrash out details of structure, sponsorship, broadcasting, prize money, and athlete appearances.
Under the central contracts plan, up to 10 of the world’s biggest names of track and field will be asked to commit to appearing in at least six of the 12 events: eight in Europe, with two each in Asia and the United States. England is expected to host two of the meetings, one in London and the other in Birmingham, though the list of venues is on the agenda for tomorrow.
In addition to Bolt and Powell, athletes likely to be offered contracts include the female World Athlete of the Year 2008 and serial record breaker, Russian pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, Cuba’s 110metre hurdles world record holder and Olympic champion, Dayron Robles and Ethiopian distance supremo Kenenisa Bekele.
Coe is fully supportive of the changes. “No change is not an option,” he told The Observer yesterday. "Athletics is a strong sport – it’s global, it’s men and women – but it’s not a game, one team against another, and it faces challenges. There’s a degree of confusion among the public about how the season works and we have to change that.
“The big attraction, and it was the real talking point last year, is head-to-head challenges. If tennis can have Federer and Nadal going up against each other several times a year, we need to have Usain Bolt running against Asafa Powell more than twice a year. We need a coherent narrative through the season.”
This “narrative” is one of three main objectives for the league: to make athletics more spectator-friendly, which in turn will also appeal to sponsors and broadcasters; to create a truly global sport, albeit with the bulk of its meets still taking place in Europe; and thirdly, to bring unity to the sport so administrators, promoters, athletes and sponsors are working together.
“We have to revisit the format, the way the sport is presented,” said Coe, “We can’t expect the public to sit there for hour after hour when there are only three or four events going on. We need some top choreographers involved to present a better spectacle. If we don’t change we die, that’s the reality of it.” When Coe was competing in the 1980s, athletics was a major draw, attracting huge TV audiences and holding its own against other sports such as football, cricket and tennis, which have since upped their game.
As Coe says, without change the prospects for athletics are dire: only 18 months ago the IAAF were told “your sport is dying” by a BBC executive during negotiations over rights. Also, there is a concern that athletics’ fanbase is ageing. The median age of an Olympics TV viewer in the US rose from 46 in 2004 to 48 in 2008. With athletics seen as the blue riband event of the Olympic Games, such a demographic is not good news for the sport.
A senior source in the broadcast industry said: “Clearly, international athletics has got to do something, because what they’re doing now is just not working. You have to applaud them for making these changes.”
One of the challenges will be convincing the elite athletes to sign central contracts. The IAAF are thought to have proposed the idea to a gathering of them and their agents at a meeting in California last November. It was met with some resistance, amid concerns that athletes would no longer be able to decide the structure of their seasons. But indications last night were that some of the athletes were mellowing. An adviser to one world record holder told The Observer that as long as a contract was for only six of the 12 races his client would be happy to sign it.
Coe is sympathetic to the athletes’ concerns, but insists that the demands are essential to the sport’s future. “I look at this through the prism of a former athlete and I know you can’t have 10,000metres runners turning out week after week. But Bolt against Powell really got people talking last year and that was an exciting period. We need more of that.”
British interests are represented at the negotiating table in Monaco by Ian Stewart, the meetings director for all televised athletics in this country, and an executive of UK Athletics. A key issue for Britain will be to avoid jeopardising current deals with the BBC and UK Athletics’ main sponsor, Aviva. The BBC has a long-term contract with the London grand prix meet at Crystal Palace, which is expected to become part of the Diamond League. Details of how that contract will be renegotiated into the new league are yet to be confirmed.
A BBC spokesman said: “The BBC has been a huge supporter of athletics and will follow with interest anything that is done to enhance the sport. We will be happy to enter into any discussions.”
The Diamond League is just one part of a strategy that could herald a new era in the structural organisation of athletics. All meetings – from grand prix to one-off events – could be brought under one organisational umbrella with the aim of creating a unified calendar for the sport.
An IAAF spokesman confirmed: “There are a number of exciting ideas that are being explored and we are looking at ways of making athletics more attractive, with a real global reach. But there are important details to iron out and it would not be appropriate to comment further at this stage.”