He broke bread with them all but Coe still knew nothing
If anything encapsulates the existential crisis that is engulfing athletics right now it is this: Lord Coe is still seen as the best man for the job. The man to lead his sport away from the brink, the man to cleanse, the man to take it onwards and upwards, out of the muck and grime and corruption.
Coe sat in a Munich auditorium yesterday and listened to what, for an administrator at the head of any other organisation in sport, would have been the last rites. The scandal at the IAAF ‘went beyond sporting corruption and may be criminal in nature’. The IAAF leadership council ‘could not have been unaware’ of doping and rule-breaking. The IAAF was ‘not responsive to the real issues’, displayed a ‘lack of political appetite to confront Russia’ and made ‘nepotistic appointments’. Later, asked about the attitude of the governing body now overseen by Coe, the assessment of World AntiDoping Agency chairman Dick Pound was brutal.
‘Every time we give a report, we get documents from the IAAF dicing and slicing,’ he said. ‘Just a few rogue individuals, nothing but loyal servants, blah, blah, blah, blah. Look, this started with the president — a president that was elected four times.’
former IAAF head Lamine Diack has left the building — although he may yet enter the Big House, if justice is served — yet his successor hardly emerged from yesterday’s events with his reputation enhanced, either.
If Diack is now considered to be a crook on a colossal scale, Coe is at best his slow-witted dupe.
As Diack concocted an extortion racket with the aid of family members and tawdry accomplices, Coe failed to show the necessary interest in their activities.
That WADA now believe senior IAAF officials knew some of the corrupt political machinations, but perhaps not their full extent, is no less damning. Coe was part of the IAAF council team that ‘could not have been unaware’.
If there was anyone in athletics as yet untainted and competent, he would have been composing a letter of resignation yesterday rather than conducting a fresh round of interviews.
Not that these proved any more convincing. Wednesday: ‘There has been no cover-up.’ Thursday: ‘We know this has been a cover-up — the delays were a cover-up.’
Yet still he sails on. Having unveiled 89 pages of damnation, Pound contrarily added he thought Lord Coe was the man for the president’s role, the best leader available. No doubt Coe had travelled to Munich for that endorsement.
He had been given an advance copy of the report and would have seen he was not mentioned by name. He probably knew that Pound would not be singling out individuals in his follow-up statements, either.
So what may, in different circumstances, have been a gruesome farewell instead became an opportunity — another chance to position himself as the reform candidate, the only game in town. Yet Coe has been in town on IAAF business since 2007. What has he been doing in that time? What questions has he been asking? Who has he been seeing?
Pound exempted several senior IAAF figures from his condemnation — not least IAAF lawyer Huw Roberts — but didn’t list Coe among those names. So we must presume WADA sees him as part of the other group, the ones it made plain were not working hard enough to protect their sport.
‘We should have known more,’ Coe admitted yesterday. ‘There was too much influence in the hands of too few people.’
He added he was putting governance measures in place to ensure there could be no repeat, portrayed all the right emotions and delivered the punchy phrases necessary to make his case.
There had been ‘malign intent’, his organisation had suffered ‘reputational damage’, it had been ‘a horror show’, he was ‘pained’ by the events. Colourful language — like his earlier protest that there had been a declaration of war on his sport, before it transpired to be a very just war.
Yet thank goodness some people were interested in asking the questions. Some of the revelations about doping in athletics may have been overplayed, but at least they brought us here.
Without them, what decrepit state would the sport be in now, considering WADA’s verdict on Coe’s right-hand man Nick Davies?
‘Aware of Russian skeletons in the cupboard’ apparently. So aware that he told his boss? WADA does not go there.
The irony is that Lord Coe has lived his life, post-competition, in the corridors of the powerful. Governments, the Olympic movement, FIFA, the IAAF, Coe breaks bread with them all. He is regarded as a man who gets jobs done, a politician, a mover and shaker. And yet what did he know about arguably the greatest sporting scandal of the modern age? Nothing.
Maybe it was like one of those dreadful parties. The cool kids are all over in one corner of the room being fabulous and you’re stuck in the kitchen with a bloke from sales, telling you the best way to avoid the Sidcup bypass at rush hour.
Maybe Coe was always about to ask Lamine Diack for an update on those Russian tests, but got called away because the ice machine had run out.
It can’t be that he wasn’t sufficiently motivated to find out, because then he most certainly wouldn’t be the man to lead athletics through such a ruinous crisis. And clearly he is. He’s the best man for the job. Everyone says so.
It really tells you everything you need to know.
He was Diack’s slow-witted dupe at best