Coe: Olympics bid won't suffer because of Iraq

Sebastian Coe is confident Britain’s continuing involvement in Iraq will not hinder London’s bid to land the Olympic Games.

The 47-year-old double Olympic champion was this week handed the task of leading the nation’s campaign to win the showcase event after Barbara Cassani passed on the baton following the city’s inclusion on a shortlist of five.

However, concerns have been voiced over a political backlash against Britain because of the ongoing situation in the Middle East with Madrid and Paris already ahead in the race.

But Coe is convinced the final decision will be taken purely on the grounds of which of the bids can best satisfy the requirements of hosting the world’s biggest sporting event, and that London will not suffer.

“I have to say to you, I haven’t really witnessed that,” he said when asked about the implications on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Sportsweek.

“I got elected to the IAAF Council, the council of my international governing body, in August last year in Paris and I got elected with votes from all over the world. Nobody sat down thinking that I was from Britain and in a particular political situation.

“I actually got the bulk of votes from the Middle East. I even got a vote from Libya. We’re talking about a very sophisticated electorate who will make judgements about whether we’re able to deliver an Olympic Games far more than where the world may be in seven ears time.”

Coe and his team will spend the coming weeks and months dissecting the initial views of the International Olympic Committee on the merits of their bid with which they were presented on Tuesday.

However, he has warned that, just because Paris and Madrid appear to be making the early running, they can take nothing for granted.

“I think we’re in a very good position,” he said. “The early leaders in this competition, really. In a way it’s slightly meaningless.

“The judgement that was made that put us onto the table on Tuesday was actually made on the basis of an interim preliminary 40-page questionnaire that was given to the IOC by every bid city in January.

“Some of the points that the IOC have made in their evaluation report are perfectly reasonable to make. Some of them, of course, are issues that we have not only dealt with but moved on from.

“But we learn from that and if you have the opportunity of being given an external report, albeit a snapshot of where we were in January, we’d be silly not to sit down and really go through it forensically. We will.”

Meanwhile, as shamed American sprinter Kelli White prepares to blow the whistle on drugs cheats with the prospect of further big names being exposed, Coe welcomed the crackdown.

“Every time we have a problem like that, it’s damaging,” he said. “We have to put it into perspective, though, and the vast majority of athletes are not stepping outside the rules.

“I’ve always said I would rather have the short-term embarrassment of dealing with a crisis like that than the long-term decline of the sport we love.

“We have to make these judgements. Sometimes we pay in athletics a very high price for vigilance.

"We have testing that’s more in depth than almost any other sport out there. We have thousands of negative tests a year. We probably want to publicise that more than the handful of positives.

“But if you’re saying to me there are people out there at the highest level who are cheating, the quicker we get them out of the sport, the better because the long-term uncertainty and decline and the potential for parents to be sitting there and saying: ‘Actually, I’d rather take my kids to other sports’ is more damaging than dealing with the short-term problems.”