McGrath: Coe damaged beyond repair
IAAF boss has been damaged beyond repair by drugs scandal
ATHLETICS IRELAND has no business helping prop up the beleaguered Sebastian Coe. The president of the International Association of Athletic Federations is discredited and cannot remain in his position. If it is vital that Russia are not allowed to compete in this year’s Olympic Games, it is as important that Coe leaves his role, given this week’s second report by the World AntiDoping Agency’s Independent Commission.
The finding that ‘at least some of the members of the IAAF Council’, of which Coe has been a member since 2003, ‘could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in athletics’, demolishes his credibility.
It makes it all the more astonishing, then, that Athletics Ireland issued a statement on Thursday evening declaring Coe should be given time as IAAF president ‘to make the changes that are clearly necessary’.
This is delusional nonsense. Coe is damaged beyond repair, and there is no good reason why the body charged with promoting and developing athletics in Ireland is supporting him.
Quotes attributed to Athletics Ireland CEO John Foley in the statement refer to the ‘massively troubling’ corruption exposed by the report. He says the IAAF ‘must change radically’.
In an interview on Morning Ireland on Friday, Foley maintained that line. He used words like ‘alarming’ and ‘shocking’ and spoke of the revelations being ‘very damaging to our sport’. His concerns were instantly undermined by a reiteration of his support for Coe, however, a man Foley appears not to recognise for what he is: a major part of a chronic problem.
‘We’ve got to look at the alternatives right now,’ argued Foley, who appeared to fear a ‘vacuum in the sport’ and that athletics would be left ‘leaderless’ and ‘rudderless’ without Coe. He cited Coe’s success in bringing the Olympics to London, but that was not about authoritative moral leadership. Coe was a glorified carnival barker, one of those people trying to lure visitors at a fairground to come and see their attractions.
He was good at it, but a facility with slick public relations is not the same as decisive management.
Athletics Ireland made a disastrous mistake in supporting Coe this week. Its backing for him in his campaign to win the IAAF presidency was explicable – given his and his federation’s failings were not exposed until the first Independent Commission report issued last November.
‘Seb Coe has all the characteristics, experience and know-how the sport needs in a new leader and we are very happy to confirm in an open manner that we will be voting for him,’ Ciarán Ó Catháin, the president of Athletics Ireland, said in a statement on July 24, a month before the election.
‘He did an outstanding job as chairman of the London 2012 Olympic Games and has proven time and time again he has the morals, vision, leadership skills and passion to lead athletics into a successful future.’
If that could be argued once, it cannot be now. Yet Athletics Ireland maintained its position and its faith in Coe.
The Englishman is an outstanding political operator. Part of his campaign for the presidency of the IAAF included a commitment to pay an Olympics Athletics Dividend to all of its 214 member federations if he was elected. It would be paid for out of funds the IAAF receives from the International Olympic Committee, and would work out at roughly $100,000 per country over a fouryear period.
It was pork-barrel politics, but of course Coe dressed it in more honourable terms.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph last August, he explained it thus: ‘Through my discussions with athletes and officials, it has become all too clear that there has been a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots in athletics.
‘The one-size-fits-all model is no longer the option it was 20 or 30 years ago. That is why I have proposed the Olympic Athletics Dividend to provide an increased level of funding to every single member federation over a four-year period, enabling each one to deliver according to their needs.’
Coe won the election, beating Ukraine’s former Olympic pole vault hero Sergey Bubka by 115 votes to 92. His political skills were obvious in edging a tight race, but athletics is in dire need of more substantial leadership. It is impossible to see how Sebastian Coe can provide it.
Trust in the sport is diminished to the point of disappearing. Athletics is perhaps one major failed test away from ruin, and given all that we now know, the IAAF must share in the blame for its wretched state.
Cycling provides an example of what happens when a sport is slow to fight its sickness. Every seemingly outstanding feat in the Tour de France is now instantly prey to suspicion that never entirely clears.
There will be great races and terrific stories shimmering off the track in Rio next August, but who can believe them? Athletics is one of the most beautiful of all sports but it is dying.
Removing Sebastian Coe will not cure it, but his departure would show a determination to learn from a past scarred by negligence as well as outright corruption.
Athletics Ireland should have known better than to back a leader whose authority is gone.
CREDIT to the GAA for slapping down the astonishing attempt by a club in London to drag the association back into the past. The opportunist move by the Granuaile hurling club threatened the years of diligent, sensitive work by many in the association to encourage a change in attitudes. However, the decision by management in Croke Park to write to the London board and put a stay on any motion to exclude a British army regiment team was strong, smart leadership. The GAA sometimes suffers from too much democracy, and this was an example of the benefit of robust top-down power.