World Athletics Championships 2021: Eugene was gifted the event, but is now struggling to raise funds to host it

Exclusive: Organisers planned to use Sebastian Coe to persuade politicians to raise taxes for the event and now face a funding crisis having failed to do so

An athlete competes in the 2015 US Outdoor Track and Field Championships at Hayward Field, Eugene, Oregon. The city is struggling to find funds to host the 2021 World Championships (Getty)

Eugene, the American city hosting the 2021 World Athletics Championships that it was controversially gifted without a proper bidding process, is struggling to raise finance to put on the event and has been forced to abandon efforts to use Sebastian Coe in the fund-raising effort, The Independent can reveal.

Organisers of the event in Nike’s home city planned to use Coe, the sportswear firm’s paid lobbyist, to persuade politicians to raise taxes for the event and now face a funding crisis having failed to do so.

Emails released under Freedom of Information legislation reveal plans to use a three-day visit this month to Eugene, Oregon, by Coe – newly elected president of the Independent Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) – to boost attempts to raise $40m (£27.8m) in local taxation to help finance the event. Political lobbying has become vital because organisers had reached no political consensus about state funding before the IAAF controversially awarded the event to Eugene without any bidding process. The award dismayed the Swedish city of Gothenburg, which had hoped to compete in a transparent contest and had its own funding in place.


 The Governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, was to meet Seb Coe 
 (AFP/Getty)

The revelations of Coe’s anticipated involvement in the push to persuade politicians come as he finds himself at the centre of new questions surrounding his knowledge that brown envelopes full of cash were being handed out by London’s rivals in return for votes ahead of the IAAF vote for the 2017 World Championships. Coe’s office insisted that he knew rumours were washing around but had no more specific knowledge than that.

In one of a flurry of emails relating to the Coe visit to Oregon, Sasha Spencer-Atwood, director of external affairs at 2021 event organisers Track Town USA, asks Vince Porter, executive director of the Oregon governor’s office, last November if there were “legislators who should be addressed while Seb is in the building” during his visit. She asked whether they should be included in a planned one-hour meeting between Coe and Oregon Governor Kate Brown – or “invited to a separate opportunity we create?”

There were also hopes to have Coe meet the Oregon Speaker and the Senate President, as well as Democratic House of Representatives member Nancy Nathanson.

Governor Brown indicated she could give Coe only 20 minutes of her time, the emails show. In the event, Coe cancelled his trip to Eugene, six days after he severed financial links with Nike following criticism by a House of Commons select committee. The key meeting with Governor Brown would have occurred on the same day the former World Anti-Doping Agency chief, Dick Pound, revealed corruption within the IAAF.

Coe has always denied that his involvement with Nike represented a conflict of interest in the awarding of the championships to its home city. There is no impropriety in him using his status as IAAF president to ask Oregon’s politicians for help. But Eugene’s cash shortfall and need to use him calls into question the decision to ditch the scrutiny that a bidding process would have brought.


 The IAAF President, Lord Coe, has been tasked with cleaning up the sport 
 (PA)

Bjorn Eriksson, former Interpol president and head of the Swedish athletics federation when the IAAF decision was made to give the championships to Eugene, said Gothenburg had all its funding in place.

“Before we were ready to bid for it, there was a lot of advance work done to ensure that our team and the politicians were unified,” he told The Independent. “This is something that has to be discussed with politicians, local authorities, potential sponsors in advance.”

Oregon hoped to get unanimous state backing for the 2021 event – the crown jewels of athletics, typically awarded to world capitals such as Moscow or Beijing rather than a modest city synonymous with Nike – but have failed. The emails released by the office of the Governor of Oregon demonstrate a desperate attempt to persuade politicians to vote through new taxes.

Strategies to gain funding for Eugene without rigorous assessments included securing decathlete Ashton Eaton and engaging “a firm to do some work with editorial boards prior to any public announcement”. That would “maximise our chances of success – I am feeling as though we need to launch several efforts,” Hans Bernard of the University of Oregon tells Brian Shipley of the Oregon government.

The president of the Track Town organising team, Vin Lananna, is now seeking to generate $25m (£17.3m) for the World Championships through a more limited tax scheme and to make up the rest somehow.