IAAF faces ‘painful’ rehabilitation – Coe
Former world athletics president Lamine Diack was responsible for the corruption at the ruling athletics body and his successor Sebastian Coe must also have been aware of the schemes and doping practices in Russian Federation, according to a bombshell new WADA report.
Pound’s first report laid bare state-sponsored doping in Russian Federation which resulted in the country being suspended from global competition by the IAAF.
Coe was in the audience as former WADA president Dick Pound, who wrote the report, sifted through the grim findings and asserted that the IAAF remains an organisation in denial.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) was aware of systematic doping in Russia for years but did nothing until a documentary jolted the agency into action, a former Russian Anti-Doping Agency official told Canadian media.
The WADA report continued: “If, therefore, the circle of knowledge was so extensive, why was nothing done?”
A World Anti-Doping Agency commission is to report a second volume of findings later Thursday on IAAF corruption in the handling of Russia’s doping crisis.
Cisse, who is said to have been assigned by the former president in November 2011 to specifically deal with doping cases regarding Russian athletes, is described in the report as being “at the heart of the schemes for disrupting IAAF results management by intentionally delaying results management and interfering with the pursuit of prosecution of Russian athletes”.
England’s squeaky-clean Lord Sebastian Coe – the 1500-metere track Olympic gold medallist in 1980 at Moscow and 1984 in Los Angeles – was a member of the IAAF executive for seven years, before he took over as president from Diack last year.
Separately, this month the IAAF gave lifetime suspensions and fines to four other officials implicated in bribery, extortion, and blackmail of Russian athletes who were doping. “And, as they say, experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want”.
Jones said the absence of a robust, overarching IAAF governance structure and clear lines of accountability “has enabled practices that have compromised the integrity of the whole sport of athletics”. “Dick Pound has placed in Sebastien Coe as the right person to lead the IAAF into a new era”. Now resigned IAAF anti-doping department director Gabriel Dolle was also involved.
Lord Coe has received crucial backing to remain as IAAF president despite another damning report on athletics’ doping scandal and admitting that he leads a “failed organisation”. The Council “could not have been unaware of the extent of doping” and the breaking of anti-doping rules and “could not have been unaware of the level of nepotism” under Diack, it said.
But in his appearance before British MPs, Coe said he had never even heard “whispers” about corruption within the organisation.
Rather confusingly, Pound appeared to contradict much of the report’s contents when asked about Coe’s suitability to lead the governing body. “Further inquires will be necessary to see what financial flows took place and their links”. It provided an in-depth look at the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs and blood doping by Russian track and field athletes and the coaches, doctors, and state officials that encouraged it. After that report, the IAAF suspending the Russian track and field federation indefinitely – including, as of now, the Rio Olympics.