World Athletics firm on Russia ban, Coe acknowledges need for solution

In the press room in Budapest, on the final day of the inaugural Ultimate Championship, Sebastian Coe stood before dozens of microphones. He did not talk about performances. He did not talk about records. He talked about a country that was not in the room. Thirty years behind the locker-room door, I have learned that the smell of victory and the smell of tears are not different, and I have also learned that when a sports official reaches for the word “integrity”, he is talking about something larger than the track. World Athletics’ ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes dates from 2026. But the story begins much earlier. The Russian athletics federation (RusAF) was suspended in 2026 after a state-sponsored doping scandal. In 2026, the war in Ukraine added a second layer of sanction on top of the first. Two reasons, one ban, and a neutral-athlete mechanism that athletics refused to build from the start. Now the story moves to Lausanne. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is handling the Russian appeal. A filing was first submitted in July. A fresh appeal was lodged last month. The hearing is expected “in the coming months.” Coe declined to disclose legal strategy: “I don’t think our legal teams would be particularly thankful if I laid out our approach.” That is the sentence of a man racing against time, not of one who already holds the winning hand. What makes this story notable is not the ban itself. It is the gap between federations. World Athletics has taken the hardest line in the entire international-sport system. The International Skating Union (ISU) chose differently: it opened a selective neutral pathway, allowing some Russian athletes to compete under neutral status. But that pathway is not a permanent shield. Kamila Valieva and her fellow figure skaters had their neutral status revoked. This is the detail both camps will cite. Ban-keepers say neutrality does not guarantee cleanliness. Re-entry advocates say the mechanism exists and merely needs to be run properly. Both are right, and that is why the story will not close. I sat in Busan in 2026, in the press room of the Asian athletics championships, when a coach smirked at my question about stride changes over the final 300 metres: “You women should write about emotion, not technicalities.” I did not argue. I spent six months analysing 800m and 1500m footage, logging every breath and every footfall. At the next championships, I put the numbers in front of him and withdrew. That is how I read the Russian story today: not through emotion, but through structure. And the structure here is clear. Before us is a two-bloc picture. The first bloc is World Athletics, with a stance of total exclusion. The second is federations such as the ISU, with a revocable neutral pathway. In between sits the Russian athletics federation; outside sits the arbitration court. Coe positions himself at the hardest end: “We have one of the toughest positions of any international federation.” That sentence is both a declaration and a warning about growing isolation. But Coe said something else, and it matters more: “Our overall objective is to have a full complement of people… competing.” This is a dual message. On one hand, the position will not change. On the other, the door to reintegration remains rhetorically ajar. In thirty years on the edge of the track, I have learned that statements of this kind are rarely aimed at the public. They are aimed at the lawyers sitting in Lausanne. So what is really happening? In an age of exploding data, I still believe in eyes, ears, and a heart that does not lie. And my ears hear two things in this story. First, World Athletics is racing against a legal process it does not control. If CAS rules against it, it will be forced to design the neutral mechanism it has refused for three years. Second, its isolation is becoming clearer as other federations gradually reopen. “The toughest position” sounds powerful until it becomes “the loneliest position” at the conference table. There is a detail I noticed that few mention. Russia is not only complaining that its athletes cannot compete. It is complaining that it cannot take part in World Athletics’ decision-making processes. This is a deeper layer of the conflict: not just the right to compete, but the right to representation. In the athletics world, a federation excluded from the decision-making table is wounded more deeply than one excluded from the track. The first can be restored in a few seasons. The second can take a decade, and sometimes forever. Russian Sports Minister Mikhail Degtyarev, via the TASS news agency, pledged that all affected skaters would appeal to CAS. That shows this is not a lone campaign by one athletics federation. It is a multi-sport strategy coordinated at state level. When Russia fights on several legal fronts at once, it is not seeking a single ruling. It is seeking a precedent usable across every sport. Back in Budapest, on the final day of the Ultimate Championship. This new event is a flagship commercial property for World Athletics. And while launching it, the federation maintains a blanket exclusion of a major athletics nation. This is the tension I call “the shadow of expansion”: you want a wider global stage, but you close an important door. In the short term, the ban can hold. In the long term, a global product needs a global field. That inconsistency will surface, just not yet loudly enough for anyone to have to speak. I am not writing about politics. I am writing about athletics, and athletics here is a sport redefining its own borders. Coe said: “I want to ensure that fans can watch the best athletes in the world, from every part of the world, competing in a truly global event.” That is a fine ideal. But to reach it, someone must build the mechanism athletics has not built: a neutral pathway for Russian and Belarusian athletes, with testing, with monitoring, with revocation. People ask what women understand about tactics. I answer by counting an athlete’s breathing from the stands, more precisely than a stopwatch. And in this case, the breathing I count is not an athlete’s but a system’s, entering its decisive phase. The CAS hearing will decide not only whether Russian athletes return to the track, but whether athletics keeps its “toughest” position or bows to a legal precedent designed elsewhere. In the locker room, I learned that records are only numbers, while history is what they do not say. In Budapest, what they did not say was time. Coe said the hearing would come “in the coming months”, but the history of CAS cases shows that “a few months” often stretches into years. If that happens, an athlete at her peak today may never touch a world championship. Not because she lost. But because she is suspended between two timelines, one of the track and one of the courtroom, and neither will wait for the other. We need women who sit in the wrong position, stand in the wrong place, and rewrite tactics in their own voice. In this story, that woman is not the one holding the microphone. She is the one in the back row, counting the days between appeals, and wondering whether the ban will outlast the careers of those it targets. What I expect is not a ruling, but a mechanism. A neutral mechanism, with testing, revocation, and oversight, would make athletics more honest than an absolute ban. An absolute ban is easy to operate, but it cannot tell a clean athlete from a dirty one. A properly designed neutral mechanism can. The problem is that World Athletics has spent years refusing to admit that the mechanism exists. The trial in Lausanne may force it to admit it. The question is not whether athletics should keep the ban. The question is whether athletics has the courage to build something harder, fairer, and more painful than a ban.