"We didn't do it for other federation's to respond": Sebastian Coe on Olympic prize money
Prize money Really quickly. What level of bravery and leadership did it take from you to push this route? Because you’re seeing a lot of reaction, good and bad, across the board, but it took a level of courage to push this. Good and bad, but mainly good. Well, entirely good from athletics, which is why we did it. It’s about making decisions that we genuinely think are in the best interest of the sport and that’s what we’ve done and we will. We’ve done that consistently in the last eight years. There has to be a linkage for the athletes As your sport grows and as you raise money through sponsorship and broadcast rights, there has to be some transmission mechanism by which the athletes understand that they’re part of this process and that’s really all we’ve wanted to do. Is your hope that this causes a domino effect? And this is just the beginning? No, it is entirely a matter for individual federations to decide how to respond. You know, we didn’t do it for other federations to respond. We did it because we thought it was in the best interests of our athletes and it is really important that young athletes come into a sport knowing that the leadership understands that there is probably. 10 years of hard work, dedication sometimes sacrificed to even begin start talking about getting to an Olympic Games. There has to be some skin in the game.