Olympics must move with the times, says Coe

SINGAPORE, Sunday - London 2012 chief Sebastian Coe on Sunday urged the Olympic movement to move with the times and not be afraid to innovate.

Coe, in Singapore for the inaugural Youth Olympics, said it was imperative to help capture the imagination of new generations.

“It’s absolutely essential that you move with the times and understand that young people are in a very different space to where they were even five years ago,” he said.

At the Youth Olympics, 3,600 athletes aged 14 to 18 are competing in the traditional 26 Olympic sports, but with a twist.

Some sports have been adapted to appeal to a younger audience with street basketball being played, triathlon with mixed gender teams and relay races in the swimming pool.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge on Saturday said that if they proved successful in Singapore, the changes could be included at future full-blown Olympics as early as Rio in 2016. Coe said he was in full agreement with Rogge. “It’s about the action, event flow, about bringing young people into a venue who want to come back in again or take up that sport,” he said. “You can only do that by innovating and I think the president is quite right.

“You’ve seen it at the Winter Games, where sports that most young people hadn’t even thought about until they watched them on television in Vancouver this year, and now they are suddenly on their landscape. “If those sports and those innovations prove to be successful and energise the Games, then yes, we should look at trying them in the full-blown Games.”

Coe is in Singapore primarily to support the British team, but also to tap into youth culture with the London Olympics less than two years away.

He said he wished something like the Youth Games had been around when he was young. “I started running when I was 12 and it was not until I was 23 that I experienced an Olympics,” he said. “To have had the opportunity at the mid-point of that process to come into this environment and learn how to live with the pressures, manage my time, would have been very, very helpful.

“I would have understood more about myself and the mental strains that you are put under when you get to the top level,” added Coe, the 1500m Olympic gold medal winner in 1980 and 1984. Coe has made it clear that the London Olympics will unashamedly be targeted at getting young people into sport, and he had nothing but praise for the Youth Olympics concept, something Rogge has championed for years.

“I don’t doubt that this will now become a fixture on the Olympic landscape,” he said. “But one of the things that organisers must never forget is that this is for young people. They shouldn’t put too tight a prescriptive template around this. “We should allow the youth to decide what they want from these Games.”

AFP