Coe wants cross-border co-operation

Published on Thursday 12 March 2009 22:22

MUCH of Scotland may be opposed to the plan to field a joint Great Britain football team at the 2012 Olympics, but that opposition should not overshadow the co-operation between Scots and the organisers of the London Games, according to Lord Coe.

The former international athlete, who chairs the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (Locog), was in Dumfries & Galloway this week for a visit which he believes exemplifies that co-operation. Along with Louise Martin, the chair of Sport Scotland and the key player in Glasgow's successful bid to host the 2014 Commonwealth Games, Coe visited DG One, the Dumfries centre which could be used as a training venue by one or more Olympic teams in three years' time.

Besides that kind of co-operation, Glasgow and London also plan to share expertise in areas such as volunteering and procurement. Many of London's temporary workers could transfer their skills to the Scottish city after 2012, for example, while thousands of the seats used in some London venues are likely to be bought by Glasgow.

The football row has so far received much more publicity than such instances of collaboration, but Coe hopes that will change over the coming months and years. While maintaining his hope that the Great Britain team will include the most able athletes in every sport, he said that as he could not determine the outcome of the row, he would work with whatever solution arose.

"Mercifully it's not my responsibility," he said. "Football is one of my passions but I'm also acutely conscious that there are 25 other sports, and we all wake up every morning to figure out how we can deliver the best spectacle for people everywhere. So we'll leave that one to the British Olympic Association and the individual federations."

Sebastian Coe won the Olympic 1,500 metres in Moscow in 1980 and retained the title four years later in Los Angeles. He believes that British Olympians of his era, as well as earlier and later, continue to inspire a younger generation, and he also insists that, contrary to a common perception, enthusiasm for the London Games does not weaken the further away from the UK capital one gets.

"It is absolutely essential if any country has a major games, that there is an understanding that it may not be in your back garden, but there are things that can be derived from it. Go and talk to (1972 Olympic pentathlon champion] Mary Peters in Northern Ireland. Nobody's sitting in Northern Ireland saying 'Kelly Holmes is a Tonbridge-based athlete who competed for Kent'. Nobody's saying what she did in Athens has any less relevance to membership rates of young girls in track-and-field clubs in Northern Ireland.

"And when Chris Hoy crossed the line in Beijing, I don't think people south of the Border were saying 'Well, he's from Scotland, it's got nothing to do with us'. It just doesn't work like that."

From his travels around the country, Coe has found that people from smaller towns further away from London have actually shown more, not less enthusiasm for the 2012 Games.

"I went to Aviemore last year – a town that has produced 24 Olympians. The Olympics matters in that community. The further you go from London the greater horsepower is being brought to try and make this relevant."