Africa, host continent for the 2010 soccer World Cup, will provide the springboard to make track and field a truly global sport, according to International Association of Athletics Federations president Lamine Diack.
In an interview at the federation's Monaco headquarters this week, Diack said Africa would be the ideal place to stage one-day meetings early in the European season as the first stage of a strategy which would eventually lead to an African city hosting the biennial world championships.
"This is the next challenge we have," Diack said. "We want to distribute one-day meetings throughout the world, a programme of one-day meetings in Africa, in America, in South America, in Oceania and in Asia.
"So we will have to organise a circuit in Africa, in west Africa and north Africa. Africa is very close to Europe.
"I want to give European athletes the possibility to go and compete outdoors in Africa early in the season."
Seven of the nine world championships to date have been staged in Europe with a 10th scheduled for Helsinki next year, raising concerns among athletics administrators that the primary sport of the Olympic Games has become excessively Euro-centric.
By contrast, soccer staged the 2002 World Cup in Japan with the 2006 tournament scheduled for Germany and the 2010 event promised to Africa.
"We will come to that," Diack said. "Twenty years ago nobody would say that Africa would run the World Cup of football. But now it will come because only African cities are bidding.
"But they started their World Cup in 1930. We only started our world championships in 1983. Our world championships was the Olympics until 1983."
BURNING AMBITION
Diack, 70, born in Senegal and educated in France, succeeded the late Primo Nebiolo as president of the world governing body in 1999.
He shares Nebiolo's burning ambition to promote athletics throughout the world while realising the practical difficulties in an increasingly competitive sporting market place.
Tokyo and Edmonton in Canada are the only cities outside Europe to stage the world championships while the United States, whose athletes regularly top the medals tables at the world championships and Olympics has yet to host the biggest global event after the Games and the World Cup.
"In America, who is going to pay to televise the championships?," Diack asked. "Everything is private. Europe is more prepared."
Along with increasing world-wide exposure, Diack recognises the need to simplify and shorten athletics meetings to make them more attractive for television.
"If we are going to survive in television, we are going to have do something," he said. "It is impossible to have four hours of competition on television."
Diack said he wanted to make the false start rule even tougher so that an athlete is automatically disqualified after one early exit from the blocks. At present there is no disqualification for the first false start in a race.
"There will be no false starts," said Diack. "The first one will be out."
He also proposed widening the takeoff area in the horizontal jumps so that there were fewer fouls and reducing the number of finalists in field events from 12 to eight.
Track and field has attracted an abundance of unwelcome publicity in the past year with the fortuitous discovery of a previously undetectable steroid THG (tetrahydrogestrinone) after an anonymous coach sent a syringe of the substance to the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
Five athletes, including Britain's European 100 metres champion Dwain Chambers, have tested positive for THG.
"If we hadn't discovered it, it would have been a very big problem," Diack said. "Fortunately we had this coach who said there's something out there, we found it and the damage was very, very limited. If we hadn't found it at that time the possibility was that it would grow. It was good for our sport and we were fortunate as well."
Diack expressed confidence that all the athletics facilities in Athens for the Olympic Games, opening on August 13, would be ready in time and said the IAAF would have a test event in the Olympic stadium in late July.
"I think we will have a good stadium," he said. "I think they will make it. It will be a very good competition."
