Jack Buckner, UK Athletics chief executive, speaks in an interview with RunBlogRun

Take the diamond league this year, I was amazed. It was just a huge step up from last year. Everyone who was there, it felt like we could make the diamond league like our (FI British Grand Prix). This is already the most important one-day meeting in the world. Some of the ideas being talked about for next year will really raise the bar for the event. And we can make it the best athletics meeting in the world. There are a lot of innovative ideas and we’re already over 40,000 sold for 2025. And that’s without some of the innovations and announcements we’ll be making in the new year , that the Diamond League is going to be key, and if it becomes our Silverstone, so to speak, it will positively eliminate a lot of the problems we’ve just introduced Our update for European Athletics in Birmingham 2026, and once again there are plenty of innovation within it.

But there’s more work to be done. The London Diamond League attracts a huge, diverse family audience. That’s the audience you get, and you know that’s the right audience for the Diamond League. makes for a great day of athletics.

Worked great last year in the lead up to the Olympics Matt Hudson-Smith, European record. Kelly’s personal best was there as well. There’s more work to be done with that, and I agree that it doesn’t necessarily appeal to a more fringe athletics audience. We’re looking for all those things, and as we develop and get some new ideas, we’re thinking about what other things we can do… how to tighten it up as a concept and what other things we can do, and we’ve got a few ideas. We’ll see if they pan out; it can begin to do so.

World Cup 2029

We’re doing the feasibility study to host the World Athletics Championships, and then we’re also looking at a number of other events for both European and world athletics, and again, we’re working on the London Marathon and the Great Run with who have been innovating in this space for the last 30-40 years. So we can do great work at events time, we’ll get it right, so we’re not going to do things that will cost a lot of money. we understand that the next World Cup to be announced is 2029 and possibly 2031.

Support coaches

In terms of coaching, it’s something that I feel very passionate about. So I’ve created a performance coaching group that (former athlete) Jenny Meadows sits on, and we’re going to meet regularly and just generally try to find ways to better support coaches. , than we have done in the past. I really hope that group of performance coaches will grow. There are some great coaches, and Jenny represents Trevor, Jen’s husband and Keeley Hodgkinson’s coach) and we had our first meeting last week. I would absolutely love to do so much more for coaches.

Hosted by the Michael Johnson Running League

We’ll see how that goes with the Michael Johnson event. We know some things about it that seem pretty US-centric. We’re interested in sustainable, innovative events, but we need them all If you don’t get things right, you can lose a lot of money relatively quickly, which is what happened historically.

The first step for us is to get the Diamond League right.There is great potential to become hugely profitable profit driver, we will add other events. We also have some ideas about our national championships. So we would like to have a more significant portfolio of events, but we want it to be built on solid foundations and profit-generating events we can get back into sports. We don’t want to – gambling is too strong a word, but you can, if you don’t run the event properly and budget for it properly, it can is very quickly lose a lot of money, what is our situation inherited.

I don’t want you to think we’re not innovative because we’re creative and optimistic about the Michael Johnson format, but three days of athletics alone is quite a lot to sell, especially in a stadium the size of London, and all the marketing required around it.

London Stadium is a long-term future venue for athletics

As far as we’re concerned, it looks delicious. They’d like us to do more. The relationship at the London Stadium is great and they love the atmosphere there. everyone involved in the event thinks the stadium was built for athletics, so they would like more. to grow

U.K.A briefing in November 2024

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  Stuart Weir has been writing for RunBlogRun since 2015. He competes in about 20 events a year, including all the world championships and diamond leagues.He enjoys finding the odd and obscure story.

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