Less than three months into his presidency at the world governing body of athletics and Lord Coe is facing the darkest hour in the sport’s history.
Sources close to Coe said he did not see it coming. Certainly not the astonishing allegation that his predecessor accepted a bribe to cover up the positive drugs tests of Russian athletes.
This, after all, was the same Lamine Diack Coe referred to as the ‘spiritual’ leader of the sport when he succeeded him in August — someone he said had left the sport with ‘an extraordinarily strong foundation’ and had provided him with the perfect ‘apprenticeship’.
‘He will always be our spiritual president and he will certainly be my spiritual president,’ gushed the double Olympic champion.
But Coe delivered that eulogy when he certainly knew some of the background. He knew that Diack’s son, Papa Massata, had already been implicated in the scandal when he stepped down as a marketing consultant for the IAAF last December.
Just as Coe knew that Gabriel Dolle, the director of anti-doping, had also left the world governing body after being interviewed by the IAAF’s independent ethics commission. Indeed, he knew that Habib Cisse, Diack’s legal adviser, had gone too.
As the French police confirmed yesterday, Dolle was in custody and Cisse and Diack had been formally interviewed, too.
And although Coe was not alone in being stunned to see allegations of corruption rising as high as the office of the president, he might have thought it prudent to be more measured in that speech about Diack.
Worryingly, it is becoming a recurring theme for Coe. He described the original allegations of IAAF complicity in the Russian doping scandal as ‘inaccurate’ and back in August he referred to the publication of leaked IAAF blood data as ‘a declaration of war’.
He has been asked to explain that last comment to a parliamentary committee that is due to meet later this month, when the same members of that body might also ask how Coe can remain a Nike ambassador when he is now the IAAF president.
His public support of Alberto Salazar, Mo Farah’s coach and the head of the Nike Oregon Project, who remains the subject of a United States Anti-Doping Agency investigation, also leaves him looking horribly compromised.
Coe probably is the right man for the job but the challenge he now faces is a daunting one. He has somehow to restore the credibility of a sport in an unprecedented crisis.
It would certainly help if he chose his words, not to mention his allies, more carefully. – Daily Mail