Lord Coe will come under more pressure when he is grilled by MPs this month — not only over his handling of the athletics doping scandal but also his links to Nike.
The under-fire president of the IAAF is due to appear before a select committee to answer questions on a crisis which has seen claims that Russia operated a state-sponsored doping programme and his predecessor Lamine Diack accused of accepting bribes to protect Russian drug cheats.
But Coe, who did not impress MPs in August when he branded some of the media coverage of the doping scandal ‘a declaration of war’ on his sport, will also be quizzed on his refusal to stand down as a well-paid ambassador for Nike.
MPs see a possible conflict of interest as Nike-sponsored athletes, including Mariya Savinova, Russia’s 800m champion from the London Olympics, are caught up in the scandal.
There also is growing resentment about the governing body’s decision to award the 2021 World Championships to Eugene, Oregon, which is close to the Nike headquarters, without a formal bidding process.
In addition, Coe has come under pressure for the fact he spent seven years as Diack’s right-hand man as an IAAF vice-president. And he was criticised by Dick Pound, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s independent commission, for arguing against the suspension of Russian athletics before reading his report.
On Monday, the publication of the report forced Coe into an embarrassing U-turn. Attitudes within the IAAF hardened yesterday and on Friday, their council will agree to provisionally suspend the Russian athletics federation from all competitions with immediate effect. The decision will be ratified next month.
Select committee member Damian Collins, MP for Folkestone and Hythe, has said he will quiz Coe about his Nike role at the meeting in Westminster.
‘If athletics is going to have a new clean image it can’t be right for the president of the IAAF to be sponsored by Nike,’ said Collins. ‘Seb Coe should give up his role as a Nike ambassador. We are also going to ask about the process of how the IAAF has handled this doping scandal.’
Earlier this week former Great Britain long jumper Jade Johnson said Coe should quit as a Nike brand ambassador, not least because Nike sponsor ‘one of the most renowned cheats in our sport’ in Justin Gatlin.
UK Athletics chairman Ed Warner also joined the calls for the Russians to be suspended. Warner said the country should be banned from international athletics competitions and stripped of hosting next year’s IAAF World Junior Championships in Kazan.
‘I am all for suspension until the systems in Russia are proved to be robust,’ he said.‘If you suspend the Russian athletics federation you then have to remove the World Junior Championships — cancel them and take them elsewhere. The worst thing would be for Russia to turn up at the World Indoor Championships in Oregon in March or to host the juniors and we find out that nothing has changed.’
The Russians attempted to deny the allegations yesterday, with President Putin’s official spokesman dismissing the Wada report. ‘As long as there is no evidence, it is difficult to consider the accusations, which appear rather unfounded,’ said Dmitry Peskov.
Nikita Kamaev, executive director of the Russian anti-doping agency known as RUSADA, did at least confirm they had complied with Wada’s order to suspend the Moscow lab which destroyed more than 1 400 blood samples.
Its head, Grigory Rodchenkov, also resigned yesterday. Kamaev said it had ‘ceased functioning’ but then insisted, rather worryingly, that RUSADA remains operational because it already ‘completely complies with the requirements of Wada’.
The aggressively defiant stance will not do Russia much good. It certainly enhances the chances of Russian athletes missing next summer’s Olympic Games in Rio.
Investigators working for the independent commission had already encountered hostility. Russian federation chiefs demanded that they do not speak to their athletes, for instance, with athletes simply refusing to co-operate.
Vitaly Mutko, the Russian sports minister the independent commission would still like to see lead the clean-up operation, was said to be ‘disgusted with the whistle-blowers’.
After interviewing Mutko in Switzerland, the commission reported that the man also in charge of the 2018 World Cup ‘does not believe their allegations and says they (the whistle- blowers) had no right to make the recordings and that such tapings are matters for the public prosecutors’.
The doping scandal is set to escalate, with Pound’s commission saying: ‘Russia is not the only country, nor athletics the only sport, facing the problem of orchestrated doping in sport.’
Other countries could soon be implicated once the commission reports back, probably before Christmas, on data about 12,000 blood tests from 5 000 athletes between 2001 and 2012 revealed by German reporter Hajo Seppelt.
Those results point to a doping problem in Kenya, as does the rash of positives already incurred by a country that has long dominated distance running.
Yesterday double Olympic champion Kip Keino, who chairs Kenya’s Olympic Committee, said government officials have shown little appetite to act against doping.
‘I have personally tried to reach government officials to agree on how to act on this menace but I don’t get appointments. I make calls that are unanswered,’ he said. ‘We even tried to convince senior government officials to attend these meetings, but they instead delegate to junior officers.’
Keino called for doping to be made a criminal offence, adding: ‘Anything else is just sugar coating.’Other countries are sure to come under greater scrutiny.
Pound said Wada were still trying to gain access to samples at the centre of the Spanish doping scandal.
‘We’re still in the goddamned Spanish courts about that,’ he said. ‘It’s going on. They’ve resisted, resisted, resisted. They don’t get it.’
What remains potentially the most revealing aspect of the commission’s report concerns the criminal element of the evidence uncovered by their investigators. The report stated that the ‘IAAF were inexplicably lax in following up suspicious blood (and other) profiles’.
But of greater significance is the evidence that is now the subject of an investigation by the French authorities that has seen former IAAF president Diack, his legal adviser Habib Cisse and former IAAF anti-doping chief Gabriel Dolle arrested and questioned on suspicion of accepting bribes to cover up the positive tests of Russian athletes.
Diack, 82, was yesterday provisionally suspended as an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee and last night resigned as president of the IAAF’s charity foundation.
Senior doping officials consider it inconceivable that the practice would be limited to Russian athletes if a system of extortion was set up by Diack and his associates.
The deeper the French authorities dig, the more likely they will find other top stars capable of paying the sums required to protect themselves against detection.
In December Diack’s son, Papa Massata, was accused by Seppelt’s TV documentary of demanding a £3.5million bribe from Doha during their bid to host the 2017 World Championships.
The French authorities are presumably investigating bribes of that nature, too. The fact Eugene was awarded the 2021 championships without a bidding process could yet make life even more uncomfortable for Lord Coe. – Daily Mail