#360view: IAAF needs to clean up mess

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  • Ineffective: WADA.

    It was as cutting as it was revealing about the state athletics currently finds itself in.

    Interviewing IAAF president Sebastian Coe on Channel 4 News in Britain, presenter Jon Snow put to the two-time Olympic golden medal winner and golden boy of UK athletics: “People can say: ‘Either you were asleep on the job or corrupt.’ Which is it?”

    It’s exactly the sort of straight talk that’s needed. Because what Dick Pound’s report on Monday has left us thinking is that those who are the custodians of the sport are either complicit in what Russia have been accused of, or are simply not equipped to deal with the biggest crisis the sport has faced in a generation.

    – Russia: Scandal exposes security agency’s links to sport
    – Russia: Kremlin spokesperson calls for proof

    – Russia: Calls to ban federation following accusations

    For Coe, it appears the latter. As in the fallout of Pound’s findings he admitted the revelations were “alarming”.

    Yet at the same time the bulk of what was being detailed on Tuesday formed the basis of ARD’s investigation, first aired on German television in December 2014.

    No one at the IAAF seemed alarmed then. Instead the response was either to smear the work of fine journalists, apathy or just outright ignorance.

    Coe’s claim in August that it was a “declaration of war on my sport” will haunt him until this mess is sorted out. If it can be, that is.

    Because while, if guilty, there can be no doubt that Russia should be suspended from international competition, what cannot be allowed to happen is this being boxed off as strictly a “Russian problem”.

    As Pound detailed: “It’s probably the tip of the iceberg. Russia is not the only country and athletics is not the only sport with a doping problem.”

    Before addressing the issue, the IAAF (and any other sporting authority that fears a similar scenario) simply has to recognise this inconvenient truth. Because simply banning one country will not make it all go away.

    Yet again we’ve reached the situation where a major doping scandal has been unearthed, showing the governing body assigned to root out the cheats are incapable of doing so.

    Marion Jones and BALCO, Lance Armstrong and US Postal, Alex Rodriguez; they were all busted by outside agencies or journalists, independent of the sport they were investigating.

    So instead of treating journalists with suspicion and contempt, the likes of Coe should recognise they’re allies in this fight. Because there’s a very strong chance things are only going to get much, much worse before they get better.

    A chapter in Pound’s report had to be redacted due to the ongoing criminal investigation by French police into Lamine Diack and his  cronies.

    That particular section contained Pound’s focus on the IAAF itself. What skeletons are lurking within those pages?

    And let’s not forget the WADA independent commission were solely focusing on Russia. Do the IAAF have the manpower and the means to investigate those other nations whose practices could potentially also be crooked?

    Most of all, do they have the will? Because for too long the organisation has had its collective head in the sand.

    A sport with its credibility constantly dangling over the precipice and with everything to lose from yet another doping scandal, has ignored each accusation and whisper and done absolutely nothing in the hope it will all just go away.

    Instead it’s only got worse. And for that, complicit or not in the corruption, they are all to blame.

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