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US president Donald Trump is right in principle to seek the exclusion of transgender athletes from women’s sport, International Olympic Committee presidential candidate Sebastian Coe has said.
Earlier this month Trump signed an executive order aimed at banning transgender athletes from women’s sports, which includes empowering the secretary of state’s office to put pressure on the IOC on its inclusion policy ahead of the Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028.
It also calls for a review and adjustment of policies “permitting admission to the United States of males seeking to participate in women’s sports”.
Coe told the Piers Morgan Uncensored YouTube channel that Trump was “right on the principle” but said: “I’m not going to get into the local conditions that he is setting about visas and all that, that is very much a US issue.”
He added: “I welcome the commitment to maintaining the integrity of women’s sport. For me, this is absolutely about the integrity of competition. I am by nature a social liberal, I really do not choose, nor do I have any predisposition to tell people how to live their lives, but when it comes to the biology of sport it is very, very clear cut. And actually I am surprised it has been as contentious a discussion as it has become.”
World Athletics is set to toughen its rules on eligibility to compete in female sport with the introduction of a cheek swab to determine if an athlete is biologically female. It intends to treat transgender athletes and athletes with differences of sexual development (DSD) alike under its new policy, and cites research that shows a performance gap between the sexes even before the onset of puberty.
“When it comes to the female category in elite sport, it has to be sacrosanct,” Coe, who is one of seven candidates to be the IOC’s next president, added in the interview with Piers Morgan. “The reason, I think, it is so important is that you cannot have young girls coming into the sport and sensing or feeling that at any stage there is a glass ceiling to their ability to perform at the highest level.
“You simply cannot have this lack of clarity. So [in] World Athletics, we were very clear, we followed the science and I think that is critical, I think we have used language that is moderate. We are not rabid here.”
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The IOC presidential election will be held in Greece on 20 March. One issue all candidates will have to wrestle with is the IOC’s stance on Russia. The country was barred from competing at last summer’s Olympic Games in Paris following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but individual Russian athletes were allowed to compete as neutrals if they were able to fulfil eligibility criteria.
Asked by Morgan if he would talk to Russian president Vladimir Putin, Coe replied: “You have to talk to everybody … of course you would.”
