A second report compiled by an independent commission of World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) said on Thursday that the IAAF Council, which included Coe, “could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in athletics”.
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“It is increasingly clear that far more IAAF staff knew about the problems than has now been acknowledged”, the report stated, adding: “If, therefore, the circle of knowledge was so extensive, why was nothing done?”
It went on to assert that “at least some of the members of the IAAF Council could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in Athletics and the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules”.
Coe was in the audience as former WADA president Dick Pound, who wrote the report, sifted through the grim findings and asserted that the IAAF remains an organisation in denial.
Pound found that Diack, a Senegalese who stepped down last year after 16 years leading the IAAF, was “responsible for organising and enabling the conspiracy and corruption that took place in the IAAF”.
“To achieve this, our sport needs the credibility of the governance structures of the IAAF to be restored and this can only happen through a comprehensive change programme which the IAAF must now embark on”.
Pound said he couldn’t think of anyone better than Coe to help athletics recovery from the scandal.
His report also details the personal relationship that developed between Diack and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Commission member Richard McClaren said that Diack “inserted his personal legal adviser Habib Cisse into the IAAF medical and anti-doping department in November of 2011 with the London 2012 and the Moscow 2013 World Championships coming up”.
The subsequent leaked email from him to marketing consultant Papa Massata Diack, son of then IAAF president Lamine Diack, was reproduced in Thursday’s report in which Davies tells him: “I will do everything in my power to protect the IAAF and the President”.
“This is a fabulous opportunity for the IAAF to seize the opportunity and, under strong leadership, move forward from this. We have to show by every action that we take that we earn that trust”, Coe said.
– According to transcripts cited in the report, Turkey lost Lamine Diack’s support in the battle to host the 2020 Olympics when they did not pay “sponsorship monies of $4 to $5million either to the Diamond League or IAAF”. The report found that Diack knew of extorting athletes to hide abnormal blood tests.
“Even though each of the impacted doping cases was eventually resolved with lengthy bans for the athletes involved, I recognise that the IAAF still has an enormous task ahead of it to restore public confidence”.
In a detailed, 30-page response to the earlier WADA commission report, the IAAF on Monday conceded that there were “unexplained and suspicious delays” in four doping cases brought to the IAAF but strongly denied that any doping case was ever covered up. The report called for a number of reforms inside the organization but also said it “was among the most active antidoping organizations in the field”, when it came to testing for blood booster EPO and adopting biological passports to catch drug cheats.
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Pound recommends a “forensic examination” of the processes behind the awarding of the 2021 world athletics championships to Eugene in the United States.
