Athletics doping scandal: Just how competent is Seb Coe?

FROM cycling to swimming, soccer to boxing and horse racing — there hardly seems to be an international sport that has not become embroiled in one form of scandal or another in recent years.

The latest involves Russian athletes and is on an unprecedented scale. Russia faces being banned from the Olympics in Rio next year after investigators found that it effectively sabotaged the 2012 London Games by running a state-sponsored doping programme.

According to the World Anti-Doping Agency, the head of a Moscow laboratory destroyed thousands of blood and urine samples and the Russian security services bugged laboratories and disrupted anti-doping work by posing as engineers at the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Such a scale of cheating must raise the question as to what the International Association of Athletics Federation, the world governing body for track and field, has been doing.

In particular, it questions the competence and ability of Sebastian Coe, the British politician and former athlete, to run the organisation. Since taking over the job last August his response to doping allegations has either been to shoot the messenger or offer weasel words about future reform.

When the allegations of Russian corruption were first aired by the German broadcaster ARD, he dismissed them, calling them a “declaration of war” on athletes. As recent as last Saturday Lord Coe, a Tory peer, denied that the IAAF had been complacent in its handling of doping cases.

In his defence, Coe points to the fact that he only took over from his predecessor Lamine Diack, in August. But he was vice-president of the organisation for six years and now criminal investigations have begun into Diack and his associates centering on bribery and money-laundering.

Diack is facing criminal prosecution, and suspension as an honorary member of the International Olympic Committee, after French police revealed he is under investigation for allegedly receiving more than €1 million to cover up doping.

The 82-year-old Senegalese is alleged to have received bribes in 2011 to cover up positive doping tests of Russian athletes, the office of France’s financial prosecutor said.

As Channel 4 anchorman John Snow put it to him in an interview on Monday, either Coe, a former double Olympics champion, was either asleep on the job or is, himself, corrupt.

There is no evidence of the latter, although Coe has enjoyed huge commercial success. He holds a senior executive position at a Monaco-based PR company that enjoyed contracts worth £30m from the London Games.

The main issue is his ability to clean up athletics. Coe was also part of Operation 2000, alongside other global figures such as Henry Kissinger, who were supposed to have instigated widespread reforms in the wake of the corruption surrounding Salt Lake City’s successful bid for the 2002 Winter Olympics.

He was also chair of the Ethics Committee of Fifa where the scale of corruption surrounding the Qatari World Cup bid is only matched by the Olympics scandal.