Mumbai: The Athletics Federation of India (AFI) will need a "couple of more days" to decide on making a formal bid for hosting the World Athletics Championships in 2027, said its president Adille Sumariwalla here on Saturday. While the recent edition of the Worlds was held in Budapest, Hungary, the next championships will be held in Japan in 2025 with India in the fray to make a formal bid for hosting the event.
"We have not made a formal bid," Sumariwalla told PTI during an event organised by the AFI and the World Athletics (WA) here. "We are discussing that internally and in the next couple of days, we will finalise that," Sumariwalla added. With India also preparing to make a formal bid to host the 2036 Olympics, WA president and International Olympic Committee (IOC) member, Sebastian Coe, said he would love to see the Games coming to India.
"I would love to see the Olympic Games coming to India," Coe told PTI. "For very obvious reasons, partly personal and partly familiar reasons but India is an amazing country and I think the development of the games would be fantastic. I think everybody recognises that. But that is for the International Olympic Committee to decide," he said.
Coe told the media here that India is crucial for the development of athletics and wants the country to host global events. "It is very important that the countries that have the ability, the economics, the political will and the sporting passion to stage events. You would be surprised, as the president of World Athletics, if I did not want to stage one of the events," he said.
"I am not here to sell other sports, I am here to promote athletics and I also want to see India stage as many of our events as possible. This is important for us. You have one of the largest populations in the world and you have a very strong economy," said Coe. "You have a population whose mean age is 28. There are some extremely popular assets that come together (which) the world sports look at. This is a place that is very important not just personally but for the development of athletics too," Coe said. (PTI)
