Sebastian Coe calls for sporting organisations to engage more with local communities in bid cities

By Daniel Etchells at Lancaster House in London

Sebastian Coe believes sporting organisations, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC), need to engage more with local communities in light of the recent abandonment of Oslo's bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games.

The Norweigan capital's bid was shrouded by public opposition before it collapsed on October 1 after the Conservative Party, the majority group in the Norweigan Government's coalition, failed to offer its financial support.

The abandonment, which has left just Almaty, Kazakhstan and Beijing, China in the running, comes at a time when there is widespread opposition to cities bidding for the Games, particularly in Western Europe.

Stockholm, Kraków and Lviv all withdrew from the race for the 2022 Games earlier this year while others failed to even reach the startline.

Coe, the former London 2012 chairman, was speaking at the Securing Sport 2014 conference, organised by the International Centre for Sport Security, in an interview with the BBC's former sports editor, David Bond.

"The challenge I think for the IOC, and all sport organisations, is reconnecting, and it's often reconnecting with local communities," he said.

"Community engagement is probably going to be more important than it's ever been around these events and the challenge, of course, in trying to globalise sport, is that there are some political structures at city level, at national level, that are probably more scrutinising than in others."

Oslo's bid for the 2022 Winter Olympics was abandoned after it failed to secure Government backing ©Getty Images

"People said to me, what would you have been doing had you lost the bid for London (2012 Olympic Games)?," he added.

"I said, I probably would have spent the first three years sitting in front of Select Committees explaining why I spent £30 million ($48 million/€38 million) on a bid that had come to very little.

"There are some environments where that simply is not a challenge.

"But it is certainly posing a challenge for cities in liberal democracies, where local communities are just more demanding, and there are tiers of transparency which you have to go through."

In a press conference afterwards, Coe spoke of how it is important for sporting organisations to create a "narrative" when bidding for major events, drawing on his own experiences from the successful London 2012 bid.

"It's not enough any longer just to make the obvious point that this is going to be a great sporting festival," he said.

"Local people are very much more sophisticated and well versed about legacy options.

"They also need to know what those plans are and I think the strength of what we did in London was that our legacy was engrained within the masterplan.

"I don't think from the second we set off on the journey to hopefully host those games, there was one step of the journey where we weren't talking in equal measure about legacy alongside the operational delivery.

"So, what I'm saying is that this is a challenge for all sporting organisations.

"It's not a particular one for the IOC, although it has been showcased recently because of Oslo falling by the way side."

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