The World Anti Doping Agency links Lamine Diack with corruption

An IAAF task force spent part of 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.

But Richard Pound, the former Wada president who wrote the report, said that Coe, who took over the IAAF in August is the best person to lead reforms of the world body.

An independent commission formed by the World Anti-Doping Agency released the second part of its damning report Thursday, detailing illicit state-sanctioned doping by track and field athletes, and corruption among top worldwide officials.

At first glance the report increases the pressure on Coe, who was a member of the Council at the time of the corruption.

Jones added it was possible that Diack could have engaged in a number of operations without the knowledge of Coe and other members of the IAAF.

Dolle was banned by the IAAF’s ethics committee for his involvement in a corruption scandal that saw a Russian athlete blackmailed to ensure a positive doping test was “lost”.

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

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”.

In his report he added: “The corruption was embedded in the organisation”.

“It can not be ignored or dismissed as attributable to the odd renegade acting on his own”, he said of the corruption. Today, Interpol issued an arrest warrant for Papa Massata Diack, former IAAF marketing consultant and son of the former IAAF president, wanted for corruption and money laundering.

It was “completely improper governance” to allow supervision of suspected Russian doping cases to be separately managed by the IAAF President’s personal legal counsel, Habib Cisse.

“If we are not satisfied at the IAAF that the countries we are looking very, very closely at are not prepared to make the changes that we want then sanctions could follow”.

Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko was quoted by the Tass news agency as saying Russian Federation understood its share of the responsibility in the doping scandal.

Any good news for IAAF?

Jones said it was a greatly concerning that journalists, rather than the organisation in charge of anti-doping, made the first significant steps down this road.

Independent commission chairman Dick Pound nevertheless exonerated Coe of any wrongdoing, expressing his belief the two-time Olympic gold medallist is the right man to rebuild the reputation of the crisis-hit IAAF. “I’d say he did not lie”, Pound said. “There’s an enormous amount of reputational recovery that needs to occur here and I can’t think of anyone better than Lord Coe to lead that”. Coe had been IAAF vice-president from 2007. I know that. We are a failed organisation.

“We can not change the past, but I am determined that we will learn from it and will not repeat its mistakes”.

Pound recommends a “forensic examination” of the processes behind the awarding of the 2021 world athletics championships to Eugene in the United States.

Coe has denied suggestions that he tried to influence Diack to award the event to Eugene. “All potential conflicts of interest be declared and special attention paid to such declarations”.