AT SOME point this evening, inside the Bird’s Nest stadium, the spotlight will swing from Beijing to London and Sally Bolton’s heart will skip a beat. The Olympic Park is the next venue for the world athletics championships and, as managing director of London 2017, Bolton, a 41-year-old devotee of rugby league, will be thrust into the full glare of a sport balanced, as this past week has shown so dramatically, between unparalleled theatre and wanton self-destruction.
The supremacy of Usain Bolt over Justin Gatlin became a symbol of redemption, but in roughly the same 24-hour span, the Kenyan, Julius Yego, threw the javelin so far that 50,000 voices were stilled, the elegant David Rudisha returned to his Olympic form in winning the 800m title, two other Kenyans, Joyce Zakary and Koki Manunga, joined a lengthy list of their compatriots in testing positive for drugs and Nicholas Bett became the first Kenyan to win a world title in the 400m hurdles. Just another day in the life of modern athletics.
Bolton will step into this maelstrom with open eyes and a confident step. She is from Yorkshire, has been chief executive of Wigan Warriors and her last job was organising the 2013 Rugby League World Cup. As a newcomer to athletics she is quite ready, as she puts it only half-jokingly, to spend a year “asking really, really stupid questions and another year asking a few stupid questions” and will not for one moment be put off by patronising answers.
“I want at all costs to avoid the phrase, ‘Well, this is the way we do it’” she says. If Bolton has her way — and she usually does — there will be fewer morning sessions on the schedule for London, a slicker, more user-friendly, presentation in the evenings and a greater flexibility so that high-profile performers such as Allyson Felix are encouraged to pursue personal goals, in the case of the great American, doubling up in the 200m and 400m. If it’s a story, if it sells tickets and attracts a new generation of athletics fans, it is worth considering, in Bolton’s eyes.
“My outstanding memory of athletics growing up was of Daley Thompson and Coe against Ovett,” she says. “It’s why people fall in love with the sport, it’s personalities, it’s incredible sporting feats and it’s head-to-heads, when it really matters. It’s very important for us in 2017 to get beyond the existing athletics fan base, first in terms of filling the stadium and, second, in terms of leaving something behind once the show has left town.”
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The one-man show that is athletics looks set to roll on to Rio next summer. But Bolt has, in his own estimation, only a “50-50” chance of stretching his long and increasingly aching legs as far as London. He aims to be there if his body holds out. If not, there will be a big hole to fill.
“Bolt is clearly very important to the sport,” says Bolton. “But we did a piece of independent research on ticket pricing, placing value on certain things. Bolt was right up there, for sure, but so were Jess [Ennis-Hill] and Mo [Farah] and some of the younger GB athletes. The men’s 100m came out as the top attraction but not by a country mile.”
The broader question is what state will athletics be in by 2017, two years into the tenure of Sebastian Coe, the new president of the International Association of Athletics Federations who takes office tomorrow. Two years more of the smoke and mirrors of recent weeks, of revelations and posturing at the top, could damage the credibility of the sport so badly that tickets for London will have to come with a health warning.
“Without doubt, this is a key time for the sport,” says Bolton. “But it’s also a new era. For a long time the sport hasn’t had a clean reputation and yet people still flocked to watch it because, fundamentally, they believe that the vast majority of athletes are clean. If people can see the sport working hard to battle those demons, they will also give the sport credit for doing that.”
By 2017, when for the first time the IPC world championships and the IAAF world championships will be held back-to-back in the same venue, the balance of the British team will have changed too. The 44-minute golden trio from London 2012 – Ennis-Hill, Farah and Greg Rutherford - have all, remarkably, won gold here but Dina Asher-Smith, bright, eloquent, marketable, could well be the poster girl for 2017. The likes of Asher-Smith and Blackburn’s Sophie Hichon, who finished fourth in the women’s hammer, the best ever placing for a British thrower, deserve to have their as yet untapped talent tested on a level playing field. Along with the demise of the tainted Russians, Hichon’s ability, at the age of 24, to compete with the best in the world is encouraging. Hopefully, by the time the show returns to town in 2017, athletics will no longer be in need of a saviour.
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London 2017 will be the biggest event to be staged in the Olympic Stadium since the Olympic and Paralympic Games – with 3,300 athletes from more than 200 nations competing over 17 days of world class action
•For more information see: www.London2017athletics. com