IAAF officials under fire in Russian doping scandal

A task force from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) spent this week in Moscow working with Russian officials to find solutions to Russia’s doping problems, and the task force’s leader said the country was making efforts to reform.

Diack also “created a close inner circle … ultimately functioning as an informal illegitimate governance structure”.

Pound’s report said council members “could not have been unaware of the level of nepotism that operated within the IAAF” and “could not have been unaware of the extent of doping”.

Yesterday’s second report compiled by the commission into the Russian doping scandal said the IAAF Council – which included Coe at the time – “could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in athletics”.

Coe was also backed by Steve Backley, Britain’s former javelin world record-holder, who said: “It couldn’t be tougher”. Diack, 82, and two other IAAF executives were arrested on corruption charges in November after the release of the first part of WADA’s report, which confirmed widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs in Russian athletics programs as previously reported by The Sunday Times and German broadcaster ARD.

The work of Wada’s independent commission is now complete and the clean-up operation continues at the IAAF.

The investigation found Mr Diack “was responsible for organising and enabling the conspiracy and corruption” to cover up doping by Russian athletes.

In delivering the findings Thursday, Mr. Pound described a system of corruption that touched almost every top official at the federation but said he was convinced Mr. Coe was in the dark on the details of the corruption.

This opinion has already been fiercely criticised, with many believing it contradicts the report’s findings, but it will come as a huge relief to Coe, who now appears to have a mandate to try to take the sport forward.

World athletics has been rocked by a series of doping allegations with Diack under investigation by French prosecutors over claims that he took bribes to hush up positive tests by Russian athletes.

Lord Coe has told Sky News he now accepts there was a cover up of doping in athletics under his predecessor Lamine Diack at the IAAF.

“He did so to enable Cisse to manage and follow up Russian athlete biological passport cases” – because while Russian coaches had mastered other doping cover-up tricks, they were still stumped by the biological passports.

Mr Balakhnichev said there was no point in waiting for a fair decision from WADA and IAAF, R-Sport news agency reported.

In Thursday’s press conference, Pound told reporters: “The IAAF was insufficiently active in investigating matters of blood doping”.

With cases against nine Russian athletes unresolved and the 2013 world championships looming, the report says Diack explained to an IAAF lawyer that he was in a “difficult position that could only be resolved by President Putin of Russia with whom he had struck up a friendship”. “We can not change the past, but I am determined that we will learn from it and will not repeat its mistakes”.

Richard Ings, who was the founding head of Australia’s anti-doping agency, said sport would never be totally clean but it needed to do a much better job detecting the offenders.