Briton Sebastian Coe, president of World Athletics since 2015, was re-elected to his post for a third and final four-year term on Thursday at the body’s 54th Congress in Budapest. Coe, 66, ran unopposed for re-election, which comes two days before the start of the World Championships in the Hungarian capital. According to the statutes of the body, he will not be able to run for a fourth term.
The double Olympic champion in the 1,500m (1980, 1984), former Conservative MP and patron of the London-2012 Olympic Games, had recovered in 2015 an international athletics federation plagued by corruption, in particular from former President Lamine Diack. .
His first two terms were marked by the creation in 2017 of the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), responsible in particular for the fight against doping, and by his intransigence towards Russia, first suspended for a scandal of doping, then since 2022 for the invasion of Ukraine.
