Sebastian Coe, the man behind London’s 2012 Olympic bid, wants to see Glasgow succeed with its attempt to stage the 2018 Youth Olympics and so add another major event to Britain’s ‘decade of sport’.

Glasgow, already staging the 2014 multi-sport Commonwealth Games, is bidding against Buenos Aires, Mexico’s Guadalajara, the Polish city of Poznan, Colombia’s Medellin and Rotterdam for the right to stage the Youth Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee are due to produce a list of candidate cities in February next year before announcing the winner in June 2013.

Coe, twice the Olympic 1,500 metre champion after gold medals at Moscow in 1980 and four years later in Los Angeles, has been keen to emphasise the British, as opposed to purely London, dimension of this year’s Olympic Games.

“I want to see, in all four corners of the United Kingdom, people bidding for things,” Coe said as he reflected on Scottish city Glasgow’s Youth Games bid.

“That is what we said in Singapore in 2005 when we won the (Olympic) bid. We wanted that winning bid to be a catalyst for bringing more sporting events to Britain.”

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Next year will see England as hosts of the Rugby League World Cup, with the Rugby Union equivalent coming to the game’s birthplace in 2015 and the Cricket World Cup in 2019.

Coe, looking to the one major sporting event already secured by Glasgow, said: “The 2014 Commonwealths is very important and I see it as another step in terms of creating a bigger sporting participation and legacy in Britain.

“To have the Olympics and Paralympics and then two years later to have a Commonwealth Games in Britain is great.

“You have got to go back to the 1970s in Canada the last time that happened when you had the Montreal Olympics in 1976 followed by the Edmonton Commonwealths in 1978.”