Race for relevance

Athletics is intent on joining sport's Goliaths but road remains to be run

- Sean Ingle

I really is quite the scene. Midnight in Tokyo, Usain Bolt is DJing and the launch party for the World Athletics Ultimate Championships is in full swing. And then the World Athletics chief executive, Jon Ridgeon, walks up to me and says: “I read your recent Guardian column, and I thought it was very unfair.”

Ridgeon, a former world silver medallist over the 110m hurdles, is one of the smartest and most reasonable people in sport. He is saying, in a polite way, that he is really rather annoyed.

It’s not that Ridgeon wildly disagrees with my premise that athletics needs to do more to attract gen Z and stay relevant. But he maintains my column is overly negative, skewed towards one side, and doesn’t reflect how much World Athletics has transformed the sport. I enjoy a good debate. So we begin to tease out the arguments and find common ground. At one point Ridgeon graciously admits some of his friends agree with me more than him. I respond by saying I should have acknowledged World Athletics’ achievements, including the Athletics Integrity Unit to tackle doping.

But there is still plenty of meat on the bone when Usain pushes the bass to tinnitus-inducing levels and we have to push our discussion down the road. Last weekend, though, we finally got the chance to thrash things out. Think of it as Ridgeon v Ingle II: this time we can actually hear each other.