World Athletics loves the word innovation. Type it into the search box on the World Athletics website and you will find articles going back to 2019. (That is already an improvement: until recently, the search function was in shambles and finding anything on the site was an achievement in itself). Unfortunately, the early articles offer little more than polished journalistic blah-blah. Things become slightly more interesting with World Athletics’ article on its “four-year business strategy”. The article links to a substantial document entitled Pioneering Change (2024-2027), which sets out the organisation’s strategic priorities for the future of Athletics.
It is an interesting document, or rather, a profoundly uninteresting one if you actually care about Athletics. It reads less like a sporting strategy than a marketing brochure. Its central ideas are familiar:
Make events faster-paced and more exciting for millions of people watching in stadiums and at home.
Increase innovation throughout the sport and bring athletes and fans closer together.
Turn athletes into the stars they deserve to be through competitions and social media.
Create more inclusive and accessible ways to enter Athletics as an athlete, coach, referee, volunteer, or administrator.
The problem is that none of this is specific to Athletics. Replace “stadium”, “athlete”, and “coach” with the corresponding words from almost any other field and the same paragraph would still work. This is not a strategy for Athletics. It is a collection of general ambitions expressed in corporate language.
The concrete plan is to “reconfigure the summer season to conclude each season with a global championship” and to launch “a new global championship in non-World Championship years”. The latter is the Ultimate Championship, to be held in September with a truncated and strangely unbalanced programme whose logic escapes me. The most revealing passage appears under the fourth strategic axis:
Discipline reform to see if we can improve the entertainment and excitement value of the sport to help future-proof athletics, with a particular focus on field disciplines, race walks and combined events.
Race walking has already provided us with a useful demonstration of what World Athletics means by innovation. First came the 35 km event. It did not take a high-level coach to see the problem. The 20 km and 35 km distances were too close together. An athlete could prepare for both without having to specialise in either. The new event filled a place on the programme, but it did not create a genuinely distinct discipline. A few years later, the 35 km was abandoned and replaced by the marathon, while the 20 km was replaced by the half-marathon. Innovation, apparently, sometimes means undoing the previous innovation. The mixed relay was at least a worthwhile idea. I find its total distance and its distribution bizarre, with legs of 11.45 km for the first man, 10 km for the first woman, 10 km for the second man, and 10.745 km for the second woman. Yet I find the event interesting. As regular readers know, I am a fan of mixed relays.
The reference to combined events gave me the chills. It probably refers to the proposed introduction of the Gundersen method, in which the final 1500 m would be run as a pursuit race. The athletes would start at intervals determined by the points difference accumulated in the preceding events. This proposal is not innovative. It is simply a way of removing the combined event’s defining feature, namely the competition between different disciplines. The decathlon is not a preliminary contest followed by a final 1500 m race. It is a competition in ten events. Turning the last event into a pursuit race would distort the contest rather than improve it. I have explained in detail why this is a bad idea and have presented the technical arguments in a separate article. I strongly recommend it if the subject interests you.
The first is the mixed 4x100 m relay. I advocated this event in a 2017 article. I had to wait until 2025 to see the relay run in the obvious order: man, woman, man, woman. Before that, World Athletics preferred the woman, woman, man, man arrangement, apparently because its decision-makers could not accept the possibility that a woman and a man could match each other’s speed in successive legs.
Then there is the steeplechase mile. Have you seen one? I have. Once. That was the beginning and the end of my experience with the event. Nobody is talking about it now.
“Improved efficiency of measurements” is another fine example of strategic vagueness. Which measurements? If World Athletics means timing in sprint events, I have already discussed the issue in my Imperative Changes series. If it means wind measurement, that subject too has been discussed in detail. In either case, nothing seems to have emerged from the proposal.
There is also a proposal to use new technology to settle ties in the jumping events. If this means the spectacle staged at the Fribourg “Future of Athletics” competition, where the highest point reached by the vaulter over the bar was measured, then I am relieved that the idea has disappeared into thin air.
I will not spend much time on the proposal to review the weights of the women’s shot and javelin. It is hardly worth discussing. Women already throw the shot beyond 20 m, which is within the broad range of men’s performances. There is no convincing reason to change the weight of the implement. The javelin is a different matter. Reducing its weight to, say, 400 g might produce throws in the region of 80 m, but only if the lighter implement could be thrown with the same efficiency as the current 600 g javelin. That assumption is far from certain. A lighter javelin would also be more vulnerable to crosswinds, making the event less predictable rather than more exciting. If World Athletics really wants to reform the throwing events, it should begin by confronting the records established before effective doping control. We may have to wait a very long time before a woman throws 76 m in the discus again.
The Fribourg “Future of Athletics” Track Lab also featured a women’s 100 m hurdles race with no lower reaction-time limit. This was presented as innovation. It was not. If World Athletics genuinely wants to experiment, it could lower the threshold to 70 ms, a value below what is normally considered a possible human reaction time. At least that would eliminate the absurdity of disqualifying athletes for reacting in 99 ms, as has happened in recent years. And if the organisation really wants to improve the women’s hurdles, it could raise the hurdle height to 91 cm. Keeping it at 84 cm suggests that the people making decisions in Athletics are still influenced by the Victorian idea that women are the weaker sex.
I will not discuss the take-off zone for the horizontal jumps at length. I have written about it several times, and the argument seems obvious to me. In one high-level official competition, unlike the Fribourg slapstick experiment, the number of fouls reportedly fell to 13%, compared with a historical average of 32%. The majority of observers appear to support the change. The exception is the group that matters most to the existing system: athletes and coaches. This is the real obstacle to innovation in modern Athletics. People do not want to surrender an advantage they have worked hard to acquire. Long and triple jumpers have spent years learning to hit the board accurately. They understandably do not want that investment to become irrelevant overnight.
The same logic keeps the women’s decathlon out of the stadium. Heptathletes and their coaches do not want to risk moving from the elite of the discipline to the also-rans once the event includes the discus and pole vault. But this is not a reason to postpone the women’s decathlon. It is a reason to introduce it. Every new event changes the distribution of expertise, and athletes eventually adapt to the demands of the discipline. The current dominance of the heptathlon should not be allowed to determine the future of women’s combined events.
And now we come to the question in the title. Where did innovation go? Nowhere. It never existed as a coherent programme, and it was never intended to. What World Athletics calls innovation is mostly presentation, repackaging, and occasional experimentation. The sport’s fundamental problems remain untouched. The organisation produces strategies, slogans, workshops, laboratories, test events, and press releases. But a genuine innovation would require something more difficult: deciding what Athletics is for, identifying which parts of the sport need changing, and accepting that meaningful change will upset people who benefit from the status quo. That is the part missing from the programme.
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