Coe confident Paris will get security balance right

DORTMUND, Germany : Having seen close up the enormous security challenge presented by the London 2012 Olympics, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said he thinks the organisers of the Paris Games will have the right balance between freedom and safety.

Coe oversaw a London Games that took place against a backdrop of potential risk of a major incident and with the constant association of the bomb attacks on the city that killed 52 people and injured over 700 on July 7 2005 – the day after London was awarded the Games.

Paris too is on high alert after its own major incidents and their radical plan for the opening ceremony to take place as a parade on the River Seine is the obvious focal point for a potential attack.

"All games are problematic from a security point of view. There hasn't been a Games in modern time that hasn't had to confront that,” Coe told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.

"I was at the heart of London so I know some of the complexity and you have to say now the world is significantly more complicated than it was in 2012.

“The best way to discuss security is actually never to discuss it. My absolute assumption is that all the right people and all the right agencies will be focusing on all the right issues in Paris. “The big challenge of course, is to be proportionate as well, because the basis of the Games is to be a host city that opens its arms in welcome to over 200 countries. So the challenge is keeping everybody safe and secure, but not have people feeling that they're in lockdown city - it's never easy.”

Coe said he hoped that Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy would join him at the athletics events, clarifying that he already had an invitation to the Games from the IOC, but predicted that such