When Laminie Diack finally exited as president of the IAAF after 16 years in charge, Sebastion Coe, the new president, sat beside him and sang his praises. He had “deep affection” and “great admiration” for Diack, he said, who was a man who had looked after athletics with “shrewd stewardship” and had given him “unflinching support and wise counsel” as a “spiritual president”.
Coe may well be regretting those words, although he has served as a politician and a sports administrator, and they learn the gift of selective memory and how to rewrite history. The spiritual president was placed under investigation by the French police recently, alleged by Elaine Houlette, the national financial prosecutor of France, to have taken “more than e1 million” from athletes to cover up doping cases. It was, like the Warners and Fifa, a family affair, as the French prosecutors said his son, Papa Massata Diack, would also have been arrested had he been in France. Just as Sepp Blatter will not travel to the US any time soon, it is very unlikely Diack jr will be seen in France, unless it is via extradition.
“It’s a form of blackmail when you say to someone: ‘Pay or you can’t compete’,” Houlette told AP of the scheme to extort money from athletes. “I don’t know if we can call it a mafia system but it is a system of corruption. It’s extremely serious. From what we’ve verified, it is more than e1-million and this money was seemingly transmitted through the Russian athletics federation.
“We didn’t arrest Mr Diack’s son because he didn’t come to Paris when he was meant to. But he is also implicated in this affair. We haven’t had the opportunity to arrest him in France. We would have done so if we could.”
Diack sr, like Coe, blamed the media and, in particular, the Sunday Times of London, after they had revealed that doping in athletics had been covered up for many years. Today, Dick Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), will sit down at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Geneva to read out an independent report into doping in athletics that The Guardian believes will “deliver another hammer blow to a sport on its knees.
But his report into allegations of systemic doping in Russian athletics, and attendant suggestions of an establishment cover-up, is just one front amid a range of allegations threatening to overwhelm the sport.”
“The Russian doping allegations kick-started a period of woe for the IAAF that took in allegations in The Guardian that Papa Massata Diack had requested $5m from Qatar during a period in which Doha was bidding to host the 2017 World Championships and a range of other corruption claims.
Through the IAAF, Diack jr denied those claims.
“His father is a contemporary of many of the cast list of Fifa rogues who have now been discredited and, indeed, appeared alongside many of them on a list of recipients of $100m in bribes from the now defunct sports marketing company ISL obtained by the BBC’s Panorama in 2010. He claimed the $41500 he received in three tranches in 1993 was assistance from friends to help him after his house in Senegal burned down without insurance. In 2011 he was censured by the International Olympic Committee over the affair, along with the current acting Fifa president Issa Hayatou. Both are of the generation who ascended to power when previously amateur sports suddenly became awash with cash from sponsors and broadcasters, yet retained governance structures and a lofty attitude more suited to a private members’ club. Diack ran his fiefdom from Monaco, while his son and his associates ran amok among the scramble for events, sponsorship and broadcasting contracts.”
Coe had changed his tune by last week: “That people in our sport have allegedly extorted money from athletes guilty of doping violations is abhorrent. That they were not able to cover up the doping results is testament to the system the IAAF and Wada have jointly put in place.”
Well, that and the media revelations. Deep affection and great admiration, Coe said. He may not want to remember those words.