The FIFA president praised Hungary and expected a lot from the Budapest World Cup. As he said, seeing the best World Cup ever:
– Europe has always been one of the strongest strongholds of athletics, the sport is loved on the continent, including, for example, in Hungary, which has a very important sporting history. I have already organized many major sporting events and athletics competitions, Budapest is a beautiful city, and there are many advantages to hosting it there.
I hope you will organize the best World Cup so far, because I have always thought that the next World Cup should be better than the previous one, and raise the bar even higher. This was the case in Doha after London, then in Eugene, and it will be so in Budapest. The World Championship is always a reference point for development, just as the athletes themselves want to improve from competition to competition.
You can hear that they are planning to fix and shorten the ten days of the World Cup. Koe explained that even if there was such a decision, it would certainly not affect the Budapest event in 2023.
“This will certainly not affect Budapest, and possibly the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo,” Koe said. We don’t get rid of our history, we don’t want to “disassemble” the competition, but as a president I have to go over everything again and again, I have to be aware of all the circumstances, I have to know who has what he needs. For the public, young people, athletes and television companies, I think ten days is a lot of time given the way and place the flow of information and entertainment is changing. Catering is very important and you’ll have the advantage of having the World Cup in a big city, a cultural center where people can do a lot of things when they’re not watching athletics. That is why I think about the length of the competition, because the morning programs and their lack of it should definitely be diverse.
The full interview can be found on the National Sports website.
Cover photo: Sebastian Coe symbolically handed the baton to Miklos Giulai at the end of the World Cup in Eugene (Photo: Facebook/Hungarian Athletics Federation/Jay Bendlin)
