Jon Ridgeon is overseeing World Athletics’ reach for a younger audience but has to battle it out with football and F1
I
t really is quite the scene. Midnight in Tokyo, Usain Bolt is DJing and the launch party for the World Athletics Ultimate Championships is in full swing. And then the World Athletics chief executive, Jon Ridgeon, walks up to me and says: “I read your recent Guardian column, and I thought it was very unfair.”
Imagine Gary Lineker going in two-footed, having never picked up a yellow card in his career. This is the track and field equivalent. Ridgeon, a former world silver medallist over the 110m hurdles, is one of the smartest and most reasonable people in sport. He is saying, in a polite way, that he is really rather annoyed.
It’s not that Ridgeon wildly disagrees with my premise that athletics needs to do more to attract gen Z and stay relevant. But he maintains my column is overly negative, skewed towards one side, and doesn’t reflect how much World Athletics has transformed the sport.
