Potential IOC president says climate change will make Summer Olympics a thing of the past

Potential IOC incoming boss Lord Coe has declared climate change to make the Summer Olympics a thing of the past, and addresses attacking social media abuse toward female Olympians.

LORD COE believes climate change will soon force the Olympic Games to be moved outside the traditional summer window.

Two weeks before he discovers whether he has become the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Coe questioned whether summer Games, even in parts of Europe, would be viable by the time Saudi Arabia potentially gets to host the 2040 Olympics.

Talk of Diamond League athletics events in Saudi has been circulating for some time, and Coe, still the president of World Athletics, said: “I think they’re keen to bid for 2040.”

Asked how he felt about the prospect of a summer Olympics being staged in the winter, he said: “By then we’re going to have to have had a readjustment of the global calendar anyway. That is the one thing I know we’re going to have to address and we should have done it earlier. If you think about a World Athletics Championships, can we for very much longer ask athletes, even in Budapest or Paris, to be running in August? No. It doesn’t work.”

Could the Summer Olympics been threatened by climate change? Picture: Alex Pantling/Getty Images

Coe said the World Cup in Qatar in December 2022 was “arguably the most successful” and the World Athletics Championships in the same country in October 2019 were the “best ever” in terms of performances.

Sport has embraced Saudi’s billions, but there has also been widespread criticism of the country’s human-rights record and subjugation of dissident voices. Asked by The Times if he felt “sportswashing” was a valid term, Coe said: “I really don’t. Let’s be open about it, to a greater or lesser degree, everybody does that - you want to show the best of your country. But there are often 30-year strategies around this. Some of those countries have actually got a much more coherent policy towards sport... than many of those countries sitting there saying, ‘Of course it’s sportswashing,’ while they’re watching school sport disappear and drift off government agendas.”

Coe says October is an ideal time. Picture: Adam Pretty/Getty Images

Speaking at the European Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn, in the Netherlands, Coe also vowed to push tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to do more to protect women from the “pond life” of social media. After Emma Raducanu was reduced to tears by a stalker in Dubai, the WTA urged the tech giants to do more to safeguard players from online abuse, while GB runners Georgia Hunter Bell and Eilish McColgan this week highlighted the “dark side” of social media.

“We’ve got to do a whole heap more,” Coe said. “I don’t want to sound like some boffin, but AI can really help here. What AI can do, turbocharging this, can be really helpful in driving some of this stuff out.”

He said he would seek urgent talks with Musk and Zuckerberg, who collectively own X, Instagram and Facebook. His message to them? “Come on, sort it out. It’s just unacceptable. There’s a huge element of social media that’s actually an act of cowardice. You cannot have young athletes thinking that the second you get public exposure this comes at you like a waterfall of horror.”

Coe, who already works closely with Ugandan and Kenyan athletics federations to combat gender-based violence, pledged to set up a new task force to find ways to protect all female athletes.

The potential IOC president wants to address social media abuse. Picture: Richard Pelham/Getty Images

Addressing a wide range of topics, Coe also said he would have no qualms about working closely with Donald Trump in the build-up to the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. “It’s not something I have control over. Like any other American president, I can’t believe he won’t want these Games to be a huge success. I remember the 1984 Games were opened by Ronald Reagan and there wasn’t uniformly a deep joy about some of the things that [he] was doing.”

One of the favourites to get the IOC role, alongside Juan Antonio Samaranch Jr, Coe admitted a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war would change things regarding Russia’s Olympic exile. “It would have to. You make judgments on what the circumstances are. It’s not for me to decide or make a judgment about unpicking the Versailles Treaty, but if that is an arrangement that gets made and agreed by both sides, you would obviously have to review the situation.”

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Originally published as Potential IOC president says climate change will make Summer Olympics a thing of the past