GLASGOW could host two of European athletics showpieces inside four years after it was revealed preliminary talks have been held to bring the 2021 European Team Championships to the city.
With the next edition of the European Indoor Championships already secured for the Emirates Arena in 2019, initial plans have been drafted to put the biennial outdoor event – which features the top 12 nations of the continent – at Scotstoun Stadium.
The three-day meeting, which was last brought to these shores when Gateshead was the venue in 2013, has been targeted as part of UK Athletics strategy to retain interest in the sport that has been underpinned by an unprecedented frequency of major track and field competitions, dating back to the London 2012 Olympics and soon to include the IAAF and para-athletics world championships this summer and next March’s world indoors in Birmingham.
It is understood that officials will also attempt to land the outdoor European Championships for London in 2022, an event which – somewhat surprisingly – has never taken place on these shores. And there appears to be no sentiment among senior figures in the sport that others, in the interests of spreading the wealth, should take their turn.
“We are already talking,” said European Athletics president Svein Arne Hansen. “Seb (IAAF president Lord Coe) has already said that he is changing the bidding system for the world championships. We have to have a more clever bidding system - or no bidding. And we have to have that in Europe as well, to go to the cities and ask ‘can you do it?’
London’s 2022 bid may be the more complicated ask with that year’s European Championship provisionally tied into the nascent European Sports Championships, which will be co-hosted by Glasgow and Berlin next year. Sources have told The Herald that officials in the English capital are reluctant to take on the burden and expense of staging up to six large-scale sporting showpieces inside a two-week period.
It might yet be tricky to counter their case. “But,” Hansen added, “we are working. The lord works in mysterious ways.”
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