PARIS: Track and field chief Sebastian Coe has hailed the emergence of an “extraordinary” group of athletes at the Paris Olympics who have gone some way to filling the void left by Jamaican legend Usain Bolt.

Bolt was a transformational figure in athletics, winning eight Olympic and nine world gold medals as he dominated the sprints during his stellar career.

Talk since his retirement after the 2017 world championships in London has always been about who might step into his shoes as the leading pin-up for the sport.

But Coe insisted the narrative wasn’t just about one athlete alone to fill the void.

“We are no longer a sport about one person,” he told reporters in Paris on Sunday, all the while praising Bolt.

“That one person was Herculean, that one person transformed the popularity of our sport for a very clear period of time, and he consistently did that.”

Coe likened Bolt’s legacy to that of Muhammad Ali in boxing.

“You don’t replace Muhammad Ali, you don’t replace Usain Bolt. But I did say, ‘Mark my words, other athletes will come through’.

“I cannot remember a generation of more talented athletes.

“The way they’ve come through has been extraordinary. We’ve now got a greater bandwidth of talent across a broader range of disciplines than we’ve ever had in the sport.”

More than one million tickets were sold for the Olympic athletics programme at the Stade de France that saw athletes from 75 different countries bag top-eight finishes.

Swedish pole vaulter Armand Duplantis, American 400m hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and the US mixed 4x400m relay team all set world records.

There were also 13 new Olympic records and the World Athletics seating area for guests featured a daily selection of celebrities keen to watch the action.

“I did slightly feel the globe wobbling the other night when I had Snoop Dogg one side of me and Simone Biles the other side and trying to explain the finer points of the 1500m,” Coe said.

“And I’m still smiling at the response from Simone, who looked up the track and said, ‘I have no idea people ran that quickly’.

“I said, ‘How do you think we feel when we’re sitting at the side of the gymnastics auditorium? How on earth do you do what you do?’” Coe said the “sport became cool”.

“It’s the first time my kids have actually thought anything I’ve done on the planet has been cool.”

Coe also underlined the reach of track and field, dubbing it the “definitive definition of a global sport”, with one eye already on the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

“We had our 105th country in the history of the Olympic Movement winning a medal in Paris and that has been sensational,” he said.

Saint Lucia’s Julien Alfred (women’s 100m), Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem (men’s javelin) and Dominica’s Thea LaFond (women’s triple jump) all won their countries’ first gold medals.

“Tell me any other sport on the opening day of a competition is celebrating a medal for Ecuador, so that for me tells me the sport is moving in the right direction,” Coe said.

“It is really important we do not take our foot off the accelerator.

“I said after [last year’s world championships in] Budapest that the red carpet is out in front of us. We continue down that carpet right the way through to LA, which will be a huge and important moment for the sport.”

Published in Dawn, August 12th, 2024