Coe Can ‘Change Athletics’ With IAAF Presidency: Mo Farah

Sergey Bubka and Sebastian Coe were pressing the flesh among IAAF Congress delegates on Tuesday in a final push for votes ahead of Wednesday’s election for the next president of the governing body of athletics.

This is one of the most crucial times in the sport’s history given the pounding it has received by repeated drug scandals, with the former London 2012 chairman keen to increase resources in “this battle for our sport’s integrity”. “I hope Seb gets the job because he can change athletics”, Farah, the reigning 5 km and 10 km Olympic champion, was quoted as saying by BBC on Monday.

The 214 members will go to the ballot box to elect the successor to Lamine Diack, the 82-year-old Senegalese who is stepping down after 16 years in charge.

“I have laid the foundations for the future of the IAAF with our two great champions… whoever the IAAF athletics family elects he will be a bona fide son of our sport”.

Diack has hailed the sporting pedigree of the two candidates: Bubka won Olympic pole vault gold in 1988 for Ukraine and was also a 10-time world champion, while Coe was a two-time Olympic 1,500m gold medallist for Britain in 1980 and 1984. “I don’t want people getting the wrong end of the stick”.

“I am confident of what we have in store as neither of the candidates will find themselves in an unfamiliar environment”.

Asked what needs to change in the world of athletics, Farah said: “In my opinion, if we all did what we do in the UK in terms of how we do testing, if every country applied to that rule, it would change dramatically”.

The head of European Athletics, Svein Arne Hansen, has called on the incoming IAAF president and council to put doping at the top of their agenda for the next four years amid the crisis engulfing the sport.

Salazar denies the claims and a separate UK Athletics investigation found no reason to question Farah’s training regime at the Oregon Project base.