IAAF Will Not Award the 2017 & 2019 Championships at the Same Time

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) will not award the 2017 and 2019 World Championships simultaneously even though they consider the Doha and London bids among two of the strongest bids they have ever received.

There had been speculation that the IAAF ruling Council would give the 2017 event to one of the bidders and 2019 to the other.

This has been done before by the IAAF, ironically involving London. The Council decided in 2000 to award the 2003 World Championships and the 2005 event to London.

Paris staged one of the successful Championships in history but London was forced to withdraw after Britain failed to keep the promise made by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to build a new stadium at Pickett’s Lock to host the event.

The Championships were moved to Helsinki and London’s current bid continues to be overshadowed by the fall-out from Blair’s failure to keep his promise.

Four years ago the IAAF also awarded the 2011 and 2013 World Championships simultaneously to Daegu and Moscow respectively.

But Bob Hersh, the senior vice-president of the IAAF and head of the Evaluation Commission, has ruled out the same thing happening when the Council meet to decide the 2017 hosts at its meeting in Monte Carlo on November 11.

Hersh said: “I don’t think we would do that in a case like this. “We have not opened 2019 for other bidders and there may be some very good cities that would have wanted to go for 19 and feel they didn’t have the opportunity to do that because we didn’t allow them too.”

But Hersh admitted that the Council face a difficult choice in choosing the winning city, with London promising record sold-out crowds in the Olympic Stadium and Doha offering the opportunity of the event being staged in the Middle East for the first time.

“We do have two very, very strong bids in very different ways,” he added.

“You’ve seen it in Doha, it’s completely different [to London] – but it has its own merits.”