by Stuart Weir
Jack Buckner, CEO of UK Athletics, speaks to the media.
Last month, Jack Buckner outlined some of his plans for the future of UK Athletics.
Assessment of the GB Elite team
10 medals in the Olympics in Paris and 10 medals in Budapest. It feels like we’ve got a great performance programme with not just established stars but fascinating stars for the future – whether you talk about Phoebe Gill or Louie Hinchcliffe – as well, obviously, as Keely and Jake and Matt Hudson Smith and KJ T and the success of the relays, so we’re delighted with the way the Paris Olympics went. So it feels like we’ve got a fascinating team.
London Diamond League
Take the Diamond League this year, I was amazed. It was just a massive step forward from the previous year. Everyone who was there, the energy, made it feel like we could make the Diamond League like our Silverstone [FI British Grand Prix]. It’s already the most significant one-day athletics meet in the world. Some of the ideas discussed for next year will raise the bar again in that event. And we can make that event the best athletics meeting in the world. Many innovative ideas exist, and we’re already ahead of ticket sales. We’re over 40,000 sold for 2025, significantly ahead of where we were this year. And that’s without some of the innovation and announcements we will bring out in the new year. So I think the Diamond League will be key, and if that becomes, as it were, our Silverstone, it will sweep up many of the issues we have positively. Also, we’ve just presented our update on the Birmingham 2026 European Championships to European Athletics, and once again, there’s lots of innovation within that.
But there’s still more work to do. The Diamond League in London attracts a huge, diverse family audience. That’s the audience you get, and you know that’s the audience that fits the Diamond League, making it the big athletics day for us.
Last year worked perfectly in the run into the Olympics. Matt Hudson-Smith, European record. Keely’s personal best was also there. There’s more work to do, but it does not necessarily attract a more peripheral athletics audience. We’re looking to all those things, and as we develop and get some new ideas, we’re thinking through what other things we could do… how to tighten it up as a concept, and what other things we could do, and we’ve got a couple of ideas. We’ll see if they come off; that might start to do that.
World Championships 2029
We’re doing a feasibility study for hosting the World Athletics Championships, and then we’re also looking at several other events for both European and World Athletics. And again, now we are working with London Marathon and Great Run, which have been innovators in this space for the last 30-40 years. They’re proposing ideas and creativity. So we can do a great job at events. And we’re ambitious around that. At the same time, we will run it correctly, so we will only be doing events that will cost a little money. It’s got to be step by step, so when we look at events and evaluate whether we do them, it would be with a view to them being successful. We understand that the next World Championship to bid for is 2029 and potentially 2031.
Supporting coaches
On the coaching bit, it’s something I feel very passionately about. So I set up a performance coaches’ group that [ex-athlete] Jenny Meadows is sitting on, and we’re going to meet regularly and just generally try and find ways of supporting coaches better than we have done in the past. I’m really hopeful that that performance coaches’ group will develop. There are some excellent coaches on that, and Jenny’s there representing Trevor [Painter, Jenny’s husband and coach of Keely Hodgkinson], and we had our first meeting last week. I’d absolutely love to do a lot more for coaches.
Hosting Michael Johnson’s track league
With the Michael Johnson event, we’ll see how that goes. We know certain things about it, which seems quite US-centric, which is fine. We’re interested in sustainable, innovative events and look at them all. But they need to be viable, too. You need to get events right to avoid losing quite a lot of money relatively quickly, which is what happened historically. So we will look at all these and see its core.
Step one for us is to get the Diamond League right. There’s loads of potential to become enormously profitable. If that becomes a profit driver, we’d add other events. We’ve got some ideas around our national championships as well. So, we would like to have a more significant, comprehensive events portfolio, but we want one built on strong, sustainable foundations and profit-building events. Then we can invest back into the sport. We don’t want to – gamble is too strong a word – but you can if you don’t get an event right and you don’t budget for it properly, it can lose a lot of money quickly, which is the situation we inherited.
I don’t want you to think we’re not innovative because we are creative and optimistic about Michael Johnson’s format. But three days of track athletics alone are quite a lot to sell, particularly in a stadium the size of London, and all the marketing required around that.
The London Stadium long-term as a future athletics venue
As far as we’re concerned, it looks delicious. They’d be keen for us to do more. Our relationship with the London Stadium is excellent, and they love the atmosphere there—everyone who turns up at that event thinks the stadium was built for athletics. So they would like more. If we can get the right products in, we’ll look at building that, but again, it’s just ensuring that the profit starts to build.
UKA briefing November 2024
