Super Shoe Secrets, Keely Hodgkinson & The Hardest Distance Race | Seb Coe

0:01Seb Coe, thank you so much for joining me on Untapped. Great pleasure. Heard a lot about it. Oh, that's very kind. We've certainly heard a lot about you and your incredible career. You're one of Britain's greatest middle distance runners. You held the world record in the 800 metres for many years. You won four Olympic medals back in your day. You won the 1500 metres at the 1980 Moscow Olympics. um how how was that you must remember it vividly still i do because it it was a look it was a great games but if you look back if i look back at my career i probably had the greatest span or or range of olympic games you could possibly have because moscow was the first of the communist Games, the Communist Command and Control.

0:56They were great games, lots of world records, but they weren't without their controversy. I fought and was quite outspoken against the boycott at the time, which the newly elected Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, pushed for. And in the end, we went, but we went without any support, really, other than the British Olympic Association that took a very independent position. And then it was pretty sort of split back at home. Some thought we should be there, some thought we shouldn't. And then when I won my, ultimately won my medal, there were no national anthems, there were no flags, or there were no opening ceremonies, the British Embassy wasn't allowed to help us.

1:38So it was a very, very good games and really well organised. But it was strange, we never left the village uh there was there was a guy who sort of shattered us everywhere we went his name was boris and brendan foster one of my great friends one of our great distance runners summoned up enough courage at one point to ask boris where the nearest nightclub was when we're all in the olympic village and he he never looked up from the newspaper he was reading he just said helsinki i mean it was a really you know it was an interesting place to be and then of course Four years later, you know, I end up in Los Angeles with the comedic, you know, the comedic, you know, extravaganza of 84 white grand pianos with Liberace lookalikes.

2:27I'll explain to you who Liberace is. You were probably too young to remember. But we had Rocketman taking off in the, you know, on the finishing straight that managed to burn a hole in the track. and and you know I roomed with Daly both in LA and in Moscow and although we didn't leave the village in Moscow other than to compete in in LA we were just able to walk out of village up into Westwood and have a burger and and relax it was a very very different atmosphere and and I can't I can't think there were two games that any athletes have been to that have been so different than Moscow and then Los Angeles.

3:06I can't imagine that as an experience. It must have been extraordinary. How did you settle on 800 metres? Obviously, you've won medals in different distances, but one of your notable achievements was you held the 800 metre world record for many years. Quite a few people consider the 800 metres to be one of the more challenging distances in running because, you know, it's long enough to be very painful, but short enough to be very fast. Certainly look at 800-meter athletes as special in many ways because it's a very difficult distance, as you know. How did you become, you know, one of the best names over that distance and why did you choose to settle there?

3:56It's an interesting story, but let me pick up on the substantive point you make there, Spencer, which is absolutely, you're on the money. 800 metres, it's not one of the most complicated or the most, it is, I think, of all the track distances, I think it is the most demanding. And you're right, it calls on what is now really 800-400 metre world-class leg speed. It also means you should have the endurance of a good 5 ,000 metre runner. I was brought up in Sheffield in South Yorkshire where, you know, everything from my front door was uphill and cross country was something you it seemed to feel it felt like I was doing cross country the whole year round.

4:44So it's and the physiology of 800 metres is is as equally challenging because you can basically own it at world class pace. You can only really absorb about 20 percent of the oxygen you need to get through the event. Your training has to be focused on managing to buffer gallons of lactic acid. So it's all speed, endurance and tough training. And then in the race itself, it's the only race that starts off outside of relays in lanes. You then break after 110 meters. So you've got the challenge of figuring out what is the line you take from the break to the sort of tangential point at the top of the track at the curve.

5:30If you're on the outside lane, you know, you don't want to be left off the pace because you can't see what's going on inside. If you're on the inside, you don't want to be under a deluge of athletes coming at you. And then it's like high speed chess. You know, you're trying to figure out distances. It's very quick. If you make a mistake at 800, it's pretty much, you know, it's over. I've made two or three mistakes in a 1500 metre race and still recovered to win it. But you make one mistake at 800, pretty much the door closes behind you. And no, I think your summation is absolutely perfectly right.

6:15I came to 800 slightly by accident because I started as a distance runner. Everything was the Harrier tradition in Yorkshire. And I remember going across to Manchester with my father who doubled up on those occasions as my coach. and we were using the 800 as just to sort of work on some leg speed for a 1500 meters that was you know coming up a week or two later and i ran i was going from i ran you know my personal best at the time was 151 and stuff and in one race i went down to 147 it then qualified me for the national team in just one run. And I remember we came back across the snake pass from Manchester to Sheffield in the car.

7:06And we were sitting there in companionable silence trying to figure out why I'd taken four seconds off my personal best in one run. And the most he could contribute at the time, and he was an analytical guy, he was a mathematician by training, and then it became an engineer, he just looked at me, he said, Well, I think we might have found your distance. And we hadn't really ever thought of it as a specialist distance. I'd always thought if I settled anywhere, it would be the 1500, the mile, even the 5k. And that's how 800 meters started for me. And that was sort of 1976. 1977, I won the European Indoors 800.

7:49In 78, I broke the British record for it. And then in 79, I broke the world record. So it was, you know, from stumbling across it in a Manchester League event, and over the next two or three years, you know, I went from that to being the world record holder. So it was, you know, to this day, I'm still trying to figure it out.

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10:29Individual results may vary.

10:35When you're the fastest in the world in a certain distance, is it fair to say that you set the pace or not always? So would your strategy on an 800-meter competitive race determine itself during the race? Or would you know exactly how you're going to run the race before running it? Yeah, great question. Look, again, it's a mixture of, it's inevitably a mixture of a number of those things. Yeah, I always went into a race with a strategy. And sometimes that strategy occasionally altered because of the feel. and on occasions you're suddenly thrown into a completely different race you because tactically a good example is the opening the the heat of the 800 meters in los angeles i was rather hoping like everybody else in the race given that we'd got four races in four days that you know i'd be able to in a way float through the first day a greek athlete who wasn't even on the ranking list suddenly decides to take the first lap through in 51 seconds that is not the moment to sort of go well you think they're going to blow up if they don't you you don't get past the first day so instead of you know a modest maybe 148 149 to qualify i found myself running 145 so that alters tactically and then you have to be very alert to that.

12:06My overall approach was always hurt people as soon as you possibly can in the race. And between 500 metres and 600 metres, I've sort of dubbed that the killing zone. And if you can really hurt people in the back straight, then that in large part defines what goes on in the finishing straight actually very often the order that people emerge from the back straight into the bend is pretty much the order they emerge into the finishing straight and probably on balance how they're going to finish the race so I was always well conditioned I had a a good distance runner's background and I found that getting them getting the yardage in as quickly as you can, taking people into oxygen debt as quickly as you could actually had the maximal impact on the runners around you.

13:10You don't always necessarily need to do that because I'd also got a decent kick. So there were occasions where that would get me out of trouble. It's a bit like, you know, accelerating out of a potential accident on the road. You know, sometimes acceleration takes you into a safe spot. So the ability to use both those assets was actually quite helpful to me. Having said that, I lost both Olympic finals at 800 metres. So, you know, it's not always fail-proof. Yeah. What were strategies back then compared to what they are now? Because I was quite surprised to see, not because of the time, but to see your record hold for so many years when presumably technology and, you know, gels and, you know, kit is improving every single year around it, yet people still weren't able to break your record.

14:10You know, nobody's ever broken 140. What would it take now for that time to be broken? and why is it that you feel that your world record held for so many years even when there were such improvements happening around it on a regular basis? It's interesting because the 800 meters if you look at the the the development of the 800 meters there have only been four world record holders in effective the last 50 years. Alberto Wontorena broke it in 1975-76 he held it until I broke it in 79. I held it from 79 until roughly 1998. Wilson Cater held it until 2011. And then, of course, the magnificent David Mdysha broke it the year before.

15:02He then broke it again in the London Games by running Gun to Tape, still the best single performance at the London Games in any sport. Extraordinary race. and so it's it's not a distance that the records change hands that often why do I think mine stayed as long as it did look I I tried to I never tried to oversimplify things or overcomplicate them but I was the product of world-class coaching I had a coach my father who was, as I said, he was a mathematician. He was an engineer. He was very, very process driven. And there was no training I did that wasn't measurable. And because he had a real understanding of endurance, particularly from road cycling, and the science of biomechanics and anatomy, me, that certainly wasn't going to elude him.

16:07But what he was really good at is that he realized that to move to where I needed to move, he would need specialist skills around the table. Not that those skills weren't, he wasn't capable of delivering himself, but he wanted to be the head coach. He wanted to create the coaching environment. And really, I was the first athlete. I mean, it's now sort of bread and butter. Everybody talks about the backroom team and the hub and the spokes and all that. I was really the first athlete to have that. And he literally went out and recruited the world's best physiologist he could find, the best nutritionists, the best conditioning coaches, and they all worked in synthesis.

16:52So I had a backroom team of about four or five, and they were all Americans, because at the time, physiology was a rather dull, I'm probably going to upset a few here, but it was a rather dull academic subject that you probably studied at Cambridge, and it was Krebs cycles and all sorts of things. the Americans were the first to take that science and make it practically applicable to how do you make. Yeah. OK, you know that science. How do you make the boat go quicker? How do you get more revolutions out of the cycle? How do you get people to run quicker? And that's that, I think, was the difference.

17:32And a lot of that coaching orthodoxy that is now accepted was very new. So he, in a way, ripped up the playbook of most of what was being coached before he came on the scene. and I like to think that, look, I pay homage. That group of people were the smartest group of people I've ever worked with in anything I've ever done and they were focused and they were committed. They spent all their waking hours and probably far too many of their sleeping hours trying to figure out how to turn me into, you know, one of the fastest middle distance runners of my generation and they succeeded. What they did absolutely imperiously was to remove every inhibitor in my life or anything that would have prevented me from delivering in a final.

18:38And so I had the luxury of walking onto the track knowing that on most occasions there was no stone unturned and there was nothing I was going to get thrown. on the track and particularly in a final that we hadn't road tested and hadn't been thrown at me a thousand times on the training track and i i think somewhere in that rather long-winded answer which i accept it is well is is the answer to the question i think that's why it lasted as long as it did i find it fascinating um also you know it won't be lost lots of our listeners um are enthusiastic runners and, you know, the different paces and different heart rate zones that you run in, you burn energy differently, the body burns energy differently, you know, fat in lower heart rate zones and glycogen, carbs in higher heart rate zones.

19:32Is it important for you? And the absorption of oxygen too. I mean, everybody gets transfixed on VO2 max, which is an interesting indices, but it doesn't really tell you at what level and at what level of efficiency that you're using that oxygen. This was the stuff that we used to do with the physiological testing at Georgia State University, the blood chemistry analysis that told me when I was approaching overload or overtraining, which reduced, again, the potential for injuries. All that stuff was really carefully calibrated. So for you, the processing of lactic acid and the way you use your oxygen was more important than...

20:20Did you ever even consider a carb load or having high glycogen levels? Because it's only a minute 41, right, that you're running for. So was that ever in your consciousness, you know, how many carbs you were consuming? Or is that just so you can train properly? I worked with a nutritionist and a really good, competent nutritionist, again, out of a really sports-based university in the US. And they were quite liberal about this. You know, we used to have a mix of food. It was there was nothing particularly special. I never I've never taken a supplement. Never remotely approached the supplement, never had, you know, I've always enjoyed pasta.

21:07I lived in Italy for a few years, of course, while I was training to the games. So, you know, a Mediterranean diet is a pretty decent diet was, you know, any no self-respecting Italian is going to sit down without fresh meat, fish, good salad. and only in the south do you sort of overload on pasta in the north pasta may only get eaten once every fortnight it's not it's not a staple diet and I was living uh for I lived for two years in Rome while I was I was training so I I was never I don't think I was ever obsessive about it but I I tended to eat well and and actually to be honest I you know I would drink I'd have beer and glass of wine with my meal as well.

21:51Obviously not on the eve of a race and probably not for a few days beforehand, but I wasn't really, I wasn't one that somebody that sort of measured everything and calibrated everything. I just felt I knew what my body was asking for at various moments in training. And of course, if you're running amongst other things, 70, 80, 90 miles a week. It's sort of a bit like feeding machine all the time. You were running 70, 80, 90 miles a week. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So not the whole, not right the way through the year. I mean, my mileage in the summer was particularly low, was lower than that because it was the intensity.

22:37So, you know, before I broke the mile world record in Brussels, my last really intensive training session was six by 800 meters with about a minute's recovery. The average time was 151 and the fastest around was 146. So I knew that I was never I was always conditioned to speed endurance. And so the whole focus of my training was not mindless mile after mile. It was, you know, what does each and every one of those miles contain? Yeah, sometimes I'd go out and I could quite comfortably run 15, 16 miles on a Sunday morning. But at key moments of the season, it was speed endurance. It was the ability to buffer the acid we talked about, and it was the physiological response you wanted.

23:42Do you think that we're close to the limits of human potential in athletics distances? Because surely records can't just continue to be broken. I think they will. Look, you know, there's nothing that tells me in civilisation, humanity, any strata you want to look at, that there's a limit to anything. So I absolutely think that these records will continue to get broken. And, you know, I also have the privilege of watching athletics, not just at senior level, but at junior and even youth level. I've just come back from the Caribbean under 20 and under 17 track championships. The perennial question I get is, you know, what do you think is going to happen or what do I think would happen when Usain Bolt left the sport?

24:44Go to the Carifta Games over the Easter weekend where you've got all the Caribbean countries. I've just watched an under-17 girl running 22-1 for 200 metres. Gout Gout in Australia has just broken Usain Bolt's under-20 world record over 200 metres, 1960-something, 1966, 1967. So, look, the answer is, yeah, I think they will go on being broken, partly because sports science is going to evolve. I think technology is clearly a big impact. the track surfaces shoes um and and look all the things that we now understand about the mentality uh and a lot of those discussions so look there's nothing there's nothing particularly new but what we are just year by year is we're just understanding a little bit more about the, well, the human condition in a way.

25:58You mentioned shoes. I thought that would spur your interest. I thought I'd get there before you did. Yeah, but perhaps... I have heard other podcasts, by the way, so I know your shoe fetish. Yes, no, I do like my shoes. I'm not sure who's more into shoes, my wife or me. My guess is you, Spencer. Maybe. When it comes to running shoes, I've got a fair few. I like to try to squeeze minutes where I can. And I enjoy myself more than compete as such. But I love learning from professional athletes on how to gain an edge. And I am curious to ask you about super shoes because you happen to be the president of World Athletics.

26:46and you know the Tokyo Marathon for example is a world athletics event you know lots lots of major marathons a world athletics event and I was keen to talk to you about why certain commercially available super shoes are banned and I was wondering in your mind why and where that line is drawn

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28:31Individual results may vary. I'm Jake Stouck, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company.

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29:37it's not an easy answer here but let me let me try and put some historical context around this i was laughing not that long ago because my uh my daughter and my sister her aunt And we were all in, you know, I think it was, yeah, it was my sister's house. And my sister and my daughter were both comparing the shoes they were wearing. And they sort of thought they were really cool. They were the retro look. And I think my sister was wearing what I referred to as Adidas Mexicana, I think that now, which was 1968 games. I think they're now referred to as Gazelle. And my sister was sort of saying, yeah, I think they're really cool.

30:29I said, they are. I said, do you know that I ran 50 miles a week in those? And my daughter laughed and she went, no way. And I went, yeah. And I said, you're wearing another pair of Adidas shoes as they were. And I went, you know, I ran nearly 65, 70 miles a week in those. And she went, no way. And look, it's the reality of it is I broke the world record for 800 meters in a pair of 24 pound 50 Nike spikes. And so there has always been an evolution. And not every not an evolution has not just been about getting more speed. out of the athletes. Look, you know, the big shoe companies do not employ research teams to design shoes that are going to make you run slower.

31:30There wouldn't be really a lot of point in that. But the point I make here is that often the engineering that is going into the shoes that are producing better performances are also really well engineered to prevent injuries and biomechanically more supportive. So it's not quite simple. It's not quite as simple about every research and development team, Adidas, A6, Rebot, New Balance, Nike, are all focusing on getting more speed out of particularly road shoes. They're also looking at how do we keep our athletes under contract in our sport for longer. The second point is, and this is the challenging question you've asked, is that there is a balance between strangling innovation and regulation.

32:32And we've never had that. We've never had a system which we now do, and it's only been with us a relatively short space of time at World Athletics, we now have an internal unit here that at least makes evaluation around shoes. And I don't want to, you know, it's beyond my general science O level, by the way. But, you know, I've got teams here that are looking at energy return. They're looking at what is mechanical advantage, but what is actually advantage that's going to impinge and impact on the integrity of competition. That system we've got for the first time, we've got an online checker so that you're going to be wearing as an elite athlete a pair of illegal shoes.

33:21Then you can go on there and check. We work very, very closely now with the shoe companies. I don't want them spending millions of dollars on research and development only for us at the last minute to say, by the way, that's illegal. There has to be some interaction. And so that's better. We have an expert panel of sports scientists and checkers in our own sport. So somewhere between not wanting to strangle innovation, because I don't think any civilization has probably done well out of that concept, but at the same time, we don't want innovation to be so intense that we're sort of losing track of the integrity of the competition.

34:13And Spencer, it's a delicate balance. I absolutely accept that. We have no input at all into you deciding to run, for instance, in a 50 millimeter stack underneath your shoe and running the London Marathon. We do have an issue about that for elite competition because that then really does start to rewrite the record books. And there'll be some out there listening to this that will be saying, well, that's already sort of taken place. And look, if I go back to my own circumstances, I think I went from being fourth on the all-time list to barely being inside the top 10 in just one race in my home, you know, the home of the Federation here in Monaco.

35:09So look, that development's around us. And Rudolf Harbig, back in 1936, was running 146 and bits for 800 metres on a cinder track. Roger Bannister was braking four minutes in a set of running spikes. One of my road shoes weighed less, or one of his spikes weighed more than both my road shoes. that I was training in, you know, 25 years later. So there has always been that development. The challenge at World Athletics as a regulator is to try and level the playing field. And it's not an easy landscape. Yeah, I suppose also it's, you know, I'm fascinated by the edge that you can gain from technology issues.

36:03You know, as I've mentioned before, I've chatted to quite a few, you know, famous marathoners in here. And I find it, I find that they all have their own opinion on what is, you know, their version of the best super shoe. There doesn't appear to be this, you know, this shoe is better than every other shoe all around. And from trying lots of things myself and going to Battersea Track or going to Battersea Park and trying Stephen Scullion's favorite shoe versus Alistair Brownlee's favorite shoe. So I've found that, you know, one is great for me and one is slow for me. And I've come to the conclusion that I think how you run, obviously, and what weight you're at in particular, makes a massive difference to the responsiveness and the energy return of the shoes.

36:50So an Alpha Fly, you know, may work really well for you, but may not work that well for me because I'm 20 kilos heavier than you. And that's just an example. You know, Stephen Scullion, when he was running 209, didn't have the benefit of a Sorkinian Dauphin, you know, Pro 2 because they didn't exist. But, you know, he was running, he would have been 65, 66 kilos, or I think he's slightly heavier actually because he was saying he couldn't quite get down there and run efficiently. But now his shoe of choice is the Sorkinian, which happens to be legal. Alistair Brownlee's shoe of choice is the Prime X3, which currently under, you know, athletics is not legal because I think it has a 50 millimeter stack and rods.

37:31But it's interesting to me as an 85, 86 kilo person, that shoe responds really well to my running, right? I find it really safe almost and easy to exercise threshold pace in that shoe. It feels nice. I don't get injured much. You know, it's a proper return on my effort. Am I correct in thinking though that the the alpha fly that Kipchoge runs in is not the alpha fly that you would buy off a shelf? You know, like Nike would make him a specific alpha fly, or is that not the case? Well, you can use a prototype for a few months, but the basic proposition is that beyond that time, that shoe has got to be available on a retail, you know, on a retail shelf.

38:19So again, then it's a balance. But coming back to the point you made, you're absolutely right. It's horses for courses. Some shoes are going to suit people. They're pronators. They're supernators. They run four foot. They're heel strikers. There are a multiplicity of biomechanics. I used to race as a middle distance runner in sprinter spikes. I never wanted the wedge heel. I never wanted my feet to feel they were basically touching, you know, really touching the track other than in the forefeet. It's probably why I walk as badly as I do now. But you're right. It is, you sort of stumble across the shoe that works for you.

39:05And I think that has been a generational thing. All I would say now is the work that goes on, and I see this because I also have the privilege of going into the research and development departments in some of the big shoe manufacturers. the average runner would be very comforted about the work that is going on not just to get speed and pace out of the shoes but actually to probably do a massive disservice to the physiotherapy and and chiropractic industry because their objective is to keep people running longer and their athletes in competition for longer and that's why the the biomechanical protective element in shoe design is often overlooked.

39:56Look, I think it's also, I'm going to speak here on behalf of the coaches too. If you really want to irritate a group of world-class coaches, you'll tell them it's all about the shoes and not about the 24-7 that they spend with their athletes in the gym doing the biomechanical assessment, the training. You know, if you speak to Lance Bauman, he thinks that Noah Lyles is probably going to be as quick in any set of shoes because he's got a world-class coach and and and lance is is not slow in telling you that he's a world-class coach and you've only got to look look at his track record and if you went back to tom tellez back in the 80s he would tell you at the same time that you know his work with uh with carl lewis was about his work on the track and yeah the shoes probably helped carl but they They weren't anywhere near the full story.

40:52So the coaches, if you were interviewing a coach, they'd bite back quite hard here on that. Yeah, no, listen, in my, again, humble opinion, there's no substitute for consistent, you know, hard work and putting in the time on the track to become fast. Obviously, you know, I would put the shoes quite far down the list after, you know, consistent sleep, good food, diet, lack of alcohol, hard training, you know, then comes the slight edge you might get with the shoe. I think what I'm happy to concede is they're more important than they, they're higher up that list than they probably were. And if they're still, you know, if they're still towards the bottom of that list, they're probably still more important than they were.

41:37That I readily accept. And track surfaces as well. You know, the track surfaces now are entirely different from what they were even five years ago. As head of world athletics, are just, you know, regular runners with a normal entry ballot allowed to wear whatever they want? Yeah, we only have... Thank you, Seb. I can't tell you how relieved I am that you're not going to strip me of my PB. Yeah. So the question I ask you is really where is this where this podcast was leading to that you get the sanction from the World Athletics president to be able to run with your illegal shoes? I promise it was just it was just a bonus.

42:26And I did say to Simon, I said, I will ask Seb if he's comfortable with me running the London Marathon in the Adidas Prime X3s. And if he says no, I wish you I wish you the best of luck. I have no jurisdiction over whatever you were. You could be wearing ballet pumps. I ran, I won my first road race and I'm now going to carbon date myself. And I think they're quite, they're quite sought after again. I won my first road race at the age of 14 in a pair of Dunlop green flash in Huddersfield. I'm trying really hard not to sound like the three Yorkshiremen off the Monty Python sketch. So we've come a long way.

43:03Well, that's wonderful news. On the side of my X3s on marathon day, I'm going to say Seb Co said this was fine. This is OK. Listen, I am just delighted. I'll call my experts off you at the finishing line. Thank you. I came into this thinking I'm going to lose my PB here and he's going to strike me off the Tokyo marathon list. Anyway, that's not why we're here. Although I have to say, I'm actually very happy about that as a result because we have the defining voice of reason here. We needn't ever talk about this again, Simon. Fantastic. This is great. I have to tell you, the blood is draining out of the faces of my communications team sitting around me.

43:47So they're probably going to tell me I have no authority to say that, but I think I'm OK. Listen, I think unless I end up on the podium, I think we're fine, right? Yeah, please don't end up on the podium. Listen, I'll try not to shave 56 minutes off my time. And if you do come running down the mile in first place, please don't wave, don't rub it in. I know, no. Listen, were that to become a reality, I understand wholeheartedly that I'll be disqualified. You've got personal relationships with some of the world's best athletes. Could I ask you, you know, what makes Keely Hodgkinson such an amazing 800-meter runner that we don't get to see, you know, as general public members?

44:30What I love about Keely is she is probably the most, forget athletic, she's probably the most authentic person I currently know. What you get with Keely, what you see with Keely is what you get. I mean, she is very funny. She's totally driven, but she puts things in perspective. I was up in Manchester not that long ago and I bumped into her one night going into a restaurant I was on my way out I'd sort of done the early shift and she turned up and it was her birthday it was a couple of weeks I mean she'd only just broken the indoor world record she was only literally a few days away from destroying the field and winning her world indoor title she was out celebrating her birthday and you know she's just completely normal but she is incredibly well talented she's got a great coaching team around her uh trevor and jenny meadows who of course was a more than accomplished uh 800 meter runner and pretty much a fixture in the british team for many years i'm probably going to lose whatever fan base i've got left in the south of england but she's absolutely rooted to the north of England.

45:50And that, for me, counts a lot in life. My dad will love this episode, by the way. He's a very proud Yorkshireman from Sheffield. Well, I'm an honorary Yorkshireman. I was brought up in Yorkshire, but I competed for the county for 18 years and it's the best county in the world. Can you please tell me about the World Athletics Ultimate Championship? Because it sounds really exciting and I'd love to hear it from you. I think it is exciting. We've been working on this for the best part of three years. And look, let me try and sort of just distill this. In a four-year cycle, we have two world championships, we have an Olympic Games, and on each of those occasions, we have the so-called billion eyeballs on our sport.

46:38Big, big global moments. Tokyo was a good example just a few months ago in our world championships. But there is a year in that four-year cycle where we don't actually have a world championship. We don't have an Olympic Games. It's not to say it's a fallow year. We still have, you know, things like, well, this is a good example. We have a European Championships. We have a Commonwealth Games. We We have what we call our continental championships. But we don't have that moment that we have in the other three years where center stage, big broadcastable moment, a billion people watching our sport.

47:21And we can't afford that as a global sport. So we looked at what it was that we could put in there that will capture the excitement, particularly the athletes. And we've gone for this after a lot of road testing and research amongst our fans, our athletes, our coaches, our stakeholders, sponsors. I don't want this to sound like a marketing seminar, but we've done a lot of background work. And we've been doing this for two or three years. And we have settled upon, effectively, a three-night world championship. It won't be every discipline. Each, you know, the disciplines will be balanced. So, you know, every discipline that we have there for female athletes, we'll have for male athletes.

48:12It'll be the top eight field eventers in the year at a particular cutoff point. The top 16 in the track events, male and female, they'll do semi and final, unless they're doing the 5K, that'll be a straightforward final. and the field of enters will have a straight final. And in simple terms, it'll be three hours a night, four three nights. It's in Budapest in September. It will be the culmination of our season. There'll be a$10 million prize pot, which is substantively bigger than anything on offer. We want it to feel and look different. Everything from reimagining what the field of play looks like, giving the athletes more skin in the game allowing them to create their own content use that content during the championships wearable tech, processing results quicker all the things that I think will make this a very different type of championship and you never know there may be things we witness in Budapest over three nights that we can sort of absorb in our more traditional world championships, which typically takes place over nine days with not 350, 400 athletes, but nearly 2 ,000.

49:35So there are big differences, but I think this will be an exciting addition to that four-year cycle.

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51:06It sounds fantastic. And if I may say, just, you know, exactly what this sport needs. I think it's really smart and really clever. Also, are you creating a world championships around just the marathon distance in 2030? Yeah, look, we agreed this at the recent council meeting at the same time that we had our world championship indoors in Poland. And we've been trying to deal with a number of issues, which finally I think we've resolved. One of them is athlete welfare. The reality of it is that trying to stage a marathon in the middle of a summer, and climate change means it doesn't really matter where that is now.

51:5840 years ago, we were sort of able to say, well, if you had it in Europe during August or September, you'd probably be all right. There's nowhere in the world where you can guarantee the welfare of the athletes and the management of heat. And, you know, we go to championships wherever we go in our world championships, where, of course, the marathon is. And we're sort of building a field hospital. And I think if we are true to our word here and we really do care about athlete welfare, we have to find a way of taking them out of what is actually often a dangerous environment. Heat stroke has impact throughout your life if you are if you succumb to it.

52:41Secondly, because of the strength of the international marathon majors, often, you know, Chicago is only a few weeks down the road from a world championships. New York again, a few weeks beyond that. We weren't getting the best fields, if we're being honest about it. So we decided to move the marathon out of our world championships and put it into a time of the year that will serve the athletes more faithfully around the challenges of climate change. will guarantee a stronger field. We'll be able to showcase our marathon runners better than we could amongst all the other disciplines. It also prevents, and it works for an organizing committee at a world championships because you then haven't got the additional challenge of road closures and all the other security issues around it.

53:46So for all sorts of reasons, we've settled on the world marathon in a city and at a time of the year where you can actually protect the the welfare of the athletes so so that's the thinking so yeah it's it's it's moving out of the world championships but it is still a world championship marathon and that city is not yet announced so that city has been announced and it is athens athens fantastic where it all sort of started so we thought that was a that's a good narrative that's wonderful well again look forward to that do you envisage any kind of breakout stars in in 2030 or will it be uh the faces we're used to that's a good question you just don't know in our sport do you you know you You know, people emerge quite quickly.

54:42The thing about the marathon is it's, you know, it's a younger cohort of athletes than we've ever had. You know, when I was sort of competing, it's what you drifted to in your 30s when you sort of no longer got the speed at 10 ,000 or 5K. Now you've got marathon specialists who are winning world-class marathons, breaking, you know, even world records in their early 20s. I think it sounds incredible. Very smart, great move. can't wait to see it happen well you know the challenge we've all got you know the challenge that any sport has or should have and if they're ignoring it then you know they're building in their own obsolescence you've we've got to keep re-engaging we have to find new audiences and we have to find younger audiences without alienating our established fan base and that that's the holy grail for for any sport and unlocking new young audiences i think i think will be attracted to this uh to this um this model uh look we've been working on it very we've been working on it very hard for two or three years and look i keep my fingers crossed but it seems to have engaged a lot of the athletes, a lot of the athlete representatives and the broadcasters are going to take it, which is a good test of the market, I guess.

56:10Usain Bolt is our senior ambassador. And that's the first time he's really come back into the sport. So we're going to use the athletes in a very upfront way. We've got Mondo Diplantis actually writing a song for the, which he's actually going to deliver himself. And he's writing that for the opening ceremony. Well, again, sounds very exciting. And, you know, looking forward to being a fan of the first Ultimate Championship. Seb, I can't thank you enough for spending time with me this afternoon. I really enjoyed learning from you and hearing about your amazing career. And I wish you all the best.

56:55And see you soon, hopefully, in September. Or maybe in Budapest. Yes, absolutely.