Olympics-Coe confident Paris will get security balance right

By Mitch Phillips

DORTMUND, Germany (Reuters) - Having seen close up the enormous security challenge presented by the London 2012 Olympics, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said he thinks the organisers of the Paris Games will have the right balance between freedom and safety.

Coe oversaw a London Games that took place against a backdrop of potential risk of a major incident and with the constant association of the bomb attacks on the city that killed 52 people and injured over 700 on July 7 2005 – the day after London was awarded the Games.

Paris too is on high alert after its own major incidents and their radical plan for the opening ceremony to take place as a parade on the River Seine is the obvious focal point for a potential attack.

"All games are problematic from a security point of view. There hasn't been a Games in modern time that hasn't had to confront that,” Coe told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

"I was at the heart of London so I know some of the complexity and you have to say now the world is significantly more complicated than it was in 2012.

“The best way to discuss security is actually never to discuss it. My absolute assumption is that all the right people and all the right agencies will be focusing on all the right issues in Paris. “The big challenge of course, is to be proportionate as well, because the basis of the Games is to be a host city that opens its arms in welcome to over 200 countries. So the challenge is keeping everybody safe and secure, but not have people feeling that they're in lockdown city - it's never easy.”

Coe said he hoped that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy would join him at the athletics events, clarifying that he already had an invitation to the Games from the IOC, but predicted that such is his humble nature that if he did attend he would probably prefer to hunker down with his country’s coaches than join the VIPs.

Coe again underlined his and his sport’s firm line on excluding all Russian and Belarusian athletes from Paris – in contrast to many other sports that are allowing limited numbers to compete as neutrals.

“That decision was about integrity and balance,” said Coe, who visited Zelenskiy in Kiev last month. "Nothing I've seen has told me that that situation has changed or is likely to change in the immediate future.

"In Ukraine these are athletes who are trying to operate at the highest level and in a diminishing landscape of facility and provision. So, of course, this was never about passports or politics, it was actually about how, by conscience, can you stand aside and watch a nation that wants to be involved sportingly being so badly disadvantaged?”

One Ukrainian who will be in Paris is Yaroslava Mahuchikh, who broke the 37-year-old women’s high jump world record in Friday’s Diamond League meeting in the French capital.

Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon also broke her own world record in the 1,500 metres that night – the distance over which Coe won his two Olympic golds in 1980 and 84.

“Where do you start, I feel as if I'm glugging my way through a quart of cream,” he said when asked which events he was most looking forward to.

"People always smile when I say this but the men’s shot – when you think of what we witnessed in Eugene and Doha it's been an fabulous competition.

“The sprints will be box office and in my own distance you have (world champion) Josh Kerr and (Olympic champion) Jakob Ingebrigtsen where there is a little added irritation, which never goes amiss in a head to head.

“I think Faith Kipyegon is the best of all time. And all this is just touching the edges. There is a lineup for the ages really."

(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Toby Davis)