The IAAF said it would make an official statement shortly.
Advertisement
“No one has been in touch with the new representatives of the Russian Athletics Federation (VFLA) about the current situation”, Zelichenok said on Thursday.
Officers visited the headquarters of global athletics in Monaco on Tuesday and took documents.
The IAAF Ethics Commission stated that an investigation is also ongoing in respect of an “additional person”.
The 82-year-old Senegalese was questioned by the office of France’s financial prosecutor for allegedly receiving over one million euros ($1.09 million) in bribes in 2011 to cover up positive doping tests by Russian athletes.
The federation’s website looked as shiny and upbeat as normal with previews of the gala sitting alongside pictures of Coe’s recent trip to Russia, but not a word on the Diack charge or any of the other unrest swirling around the sport.
“These investigations are a result of information passed on by Wada’s Independent Commission (IC) to the relevant authorities”, the statement read.
After the IAAF changed its rules to allow the ethics committee to break its silence, it confirmed that an investigation by the recently retired Lord Justice Sir Anthony Hooper, which is understood to have begun in spring 2014 before the German claims were broadcast, had been completed.
Wada then said that the IC’s chair, Dick Pound, would be making public his findings in Geneva on Monday.
He served as president from 1999 until August this year when he was succeeded by Briton Coe who ran on a platform to reform athletics and improve its integrity.
Papa Massata Diack is a former consultant to the IAAF, Balakhnichev is the former president of the All-Russia Athletic Federation (ARAF), Melnikov is a former chief ARAF coach for long distance walkers and runners, and Dolle is the former director of the IAAF’s anti-doping department. “What is certain is that Mr. Cisse, the legal adviser to Mr. Diack, traveled to Russia and gave to the Russian federation the list of Russian athletes suspected of doping and, in exchange for sums of money, these athletes weren’t sanctioned”. The old management isn’t working there anymore. “We express full confidence in the new leadership of the IAAF which has repeatedly declared that it is in full alignment with the call for good governance in sport and the protection of the clean athletes”.
Advertisement
Coe, in the top IAAF job for less than three months, is facing his sport’s second major doping controversy in the period, the most recent of which was labelled “worse than FIFA” by his former British athletics team mate Daley Thompson.
