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Chapter 18
Lord Coe, The Chief Nurse of the Nightingale, and the Excel Centre in London
Lord Coe is an extraordinary man with so much versatility, he continues to break new ground and is constantly looking to help the organisations that he works with perform better. The same is true for Eamonn Sullivan, The Chief Nurse at the Nightingale during the pandemic.
Both of these men have the ability to deal with uncertainty and if you read the chapter on Kevin Dutton, you will realise why! Thank goodness there are people like this in the world who want to make a difference and help
others.
This story is about how I found myself involved with an event with Lord Coe at the London Excel, Royal Victoria Dock, in London on 16th January 2017 for the World Athletics Congress and Connect before the World Championships and three years later on the 24 th of March 2020, this same venue was used as an emergency COVID-19 hospital facility with 4,000 beds, delivering the first 500 in just nine days. I met the man who was behind the planning of this at a time when no one knew what was going to happen to the world.
By Harvey Thorneycroft
Chapter 18: Lord Coe, The Chief Nurse of the Nightingale and the Excel Centre in London
HTL were appointed to deliver the 2016 IAAF World Athletic Awards on Friday 2nd December 2016, which was held in the Salle des Etoiles in Monaco. We thought this would be a one-off mandate.
Little did we know that we would have the privilege of leading the delivery of the IAAF Athletics Awards for three successive years, working in collaboration with PrettyGreen and SheyZam Media Ltd. It was always a spectacular occasion attended by elite athletes who travelled to Monaco from all around the globe.
In 2016, I got a greater appreciation of the true leadership qualities of Lord Coe. There are very few people in the world, who have achieved what he has achieved, winning Olympic gold at the blue-riband 1500 metres event in both 1980 and 1984. During his career, he set eleven world records, including the world record for 800 metres which stood from 1981 to 1997. Following his retirement from athletics, he became a Conservative MP, and later led the successful London Olympic bid and the organising committee of 2012.
It would have been very easy for him to be satisfied with his achievements and not to try to do anything else. In August 2015, he was elected president of the IAAF (World Athletics) amid the difficult backdrop of doping issues in the sport. We ran the awards for him in 2016 with the IAAF, but until then had no appreciation of the role that he had taken on.
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