Defiant Coe vows: I will not quit IAAF

BESEIGED world athletics chief Sebastian Coe hit back last night and insisted he would not resign in the face of the drugs scandal that has rocked his sport.

Coe has confided to at least one close friend that ‘it’s been killing me’.

In his first newspaper interview since the IAAF were effectively cleared of being asleep at the wheel of their anti-doping operation for years, he told the Irish Mail on Sunday yesterday:

While the crisis in his sport has been ‘personally a tough moment’, his own travails were ‘an irrelevance’ and he has no intention of quitting before his four-year term is over.

* He now has to be ‘absolutely brutal on myself and unflinching on the changes I’ve got to make’ to win back public trust in his sport.

* He regrets that the IAAF ignored an offer more than two and a half years ago by this newspaper to provide information about systematic doping and cover-ups in Russia.

* He never viewed a £90,000-a-year ambassadorship deal with Nike as a conflict of interest, denying categorically the sportswear company ever told him what to say. He confirmed Nike had not contributed to his presidential campaign.

* He expects to be axed if any shred of evidence of impropriety by him personally is brought forward. ‘It would have to dealt with independently and in a very, very tough way,’ he said.

‘Yes, this has been a tough time,’ he said yesterday. ‘You’d be bemused if I said to you that this wasn’t personally a tough moment. But to me that’s a bit of an irrelevance.

‘I’m an athlete at heart. I was lucky to experience the highs and lows of competition, Olympic stadiums and world records. It is what I do, it defines me. So the real pain I feel of all this is as an athlete, it’s not as an administrator.’