Seb Coe may need to make tough decisions that don’t favor Nike, then What?

“No conflict of interest as far as I'm concerned,” says Carla van Kampen in response to Nike naming a building in Seb Coe’s name. “Coe was one of the greatest runners of all time (800/1500),” Carla continued. “If Coe shows any favoritism towards Nike in the future, well then that's something else. I met Coe a couple of years ago while he was in Rome for the World Race Walking Championships before the Rio Olympics, and he was a class act, so engaged and friendly.” Bob Anderson, the founder and publisher of Runner’s World for 18 years (1966-1984) and now MBR answered, “I agree, Lord Seb Coe is a class act. But if he needs to make some decisions on matters that does not favor Nike, he needs to be able to do this without Nike retaliating. Many years ago when we published that, at the time, Brooks made a better shoe in our shoe issue, Nike retaliated by not attacking RW (since everyone loved our magazine) but Nike attacked me. They sent out a press release to all their dealers questioning my integrity and then pulled out one million dollars of advertising. They were our largest advertiser but we published the shoe ranking results in the order as our Penn State lab presented them to us. (Nike's action caused the FTC to do an investigation. After a year or so they announced no company was favored unfairly.) What is important now is that the IAAF runs our sport not Nike. However, Nike’s support (just like their support of RW from 1966 to 1980) is very valuable to our sport. It is a fine line.” Bob says.

posted Wednesday March 14th
by Bob Anderson