JESS’S COACH BLASTS NIKE LINK

JESSICA ENNIS-HILL’S coach hit out at UK Athletics, suggesting they may have been compromised by a lucrative sponsorship deal with Nike in their decision to stand by Mo Farah’s coach Alberto Salazar. Toni Minichiello, who has led Ennis-Hill to Olympic glory and two World Championships titles, said he felt let down by the findings of the report into UKA’s relationships with Salazar, who heads up the Nike-funded Oregon Project training group which Farah joined in 2011. ‘It’s a very sad day because there’s still no solid conclusions,’ Minichiello said. ‘I haven’t got a lot of faith in drugs testing in athletics at the moment and this again adds nothing. It’s also a coincidence that the findings were released on the first day of a home Rugby World Cup.’ The review was conducted by a performance oversight group, composed of Jason Gardener, Dr Sarah Rowell and Anne Wafula Strike and was prompted by a BBC Panorama documentary in June which alleged Salazar encouraged his athletes, including Farah’s training partner Galen Rupp, to flout anti-doping rules. Minichiello suspects the closeness of Nike and UKA, whose chief executive Niels De Vos negotiated a seven-year sponsorship deal worth around £15million with the sportswear giant running until 2020, may have compromised the investigation. Minichiello said: ‘There are large commercial ramifications, I’m sure, attached to this. These decisions are not made about drug-taking alone, they’re made in a much larger context. I think it would be naive to think that the commercial arrangement and use of Salazar as a consultant are not connected.’ UK Athletics declined to comment.