Coe re-elected President of World Athletics for the third time

Budapest: Sebastian Coe was re-elected president of World Athletics for a third term, the governing body said in a statement after its 54th Congress in Budapest on Thursday.Raul Chapado, Adille Sumariwalla and Jackson Tuwei were elected vice-presidents, alongside Colombia’s Ximena Restrepo, who was re-elected.The global body added that it had met its minimum gender target set out in 2016 of having 13 members of each gender elected to the World Athletics Council four years early."I’m grateful for the support of my colleagues and delighted to see that more of the commitments we made during the governance reform process in 2016 have come to fruition with the election of World Athletics’ first gender equal council four years ahead of schedule,” Coe said."But the job is not done yet and we need to keep pushing for gender parity throughout our representative bodies.”World Athletics has until its 2027 Congress to meet the remaining requirement from its 2016 reform plan of having two vice-presidents of each gender.Coe said on Thursday it was "unlikely” that track and field athletes from Russia and Belarus would be welcomed back to competition before next year’s Paris Olympics.All Russian and Belarusian athletes have been banned from competition "for the foreseeable future” since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. That includes the option of competing as a neutral."I don’t have a crystal ball, I follow world events in the same way that you all do,” Coe told journalists after his re-election as head of track and field’s world governing body."Our position is very clear. The Council has made that position clear. The new Council – and I’m not going to speak for them in advance – but I would be very surprised if there is any shift in that position."We have certainty and we’ve done it for reasons of integrity of competition.”Coe added: "We will of course monitor that situation."We have risk committees, we have working groups that will always be wanting to be across that and what might the circumstances look like if there’s any shift in the situation but I have to say that looks unlikely at the moment with where we are with events in Ukraine.”International sports bodies are taking wildly varying stances on allowing Russian and Belarusian athletes to compete while the war in Ukraine continues.The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says it is yet to make a decision on whether Russians can compete at the Paris Olympics next year but it has recommended they return to competition.That stance has received a mixed welcome from federations, with Coe’s World Athletics among the most stringent of opponents to their return should the conflict continue.