COE’S TEAM AGREE TO SUSPEND RUSSIANS
Suspect regime banned but given easy route back
RUSSIA’S national athletics federation has been suspended from competition after being accused of running a statesponsored doping programme. But new IAAF president Seb Coe said the ‘whole system has failed the athletes around the world’. He branded it a ‘shameful wake-up call’ for the sport. An explosive independent report commissioned by the World AntiDoping Agency and published on Monday exposed the Russians, with evidence of a Moscow-testing laboratory that even destroyed samples. After a conference call meeting last night involving 24 members of the 27-strong IAAF council, Coe — at his London office — announced that the All-Russia Athletic Federation (ARAF) had been provisionally suspended with immediate effect, with 22 voting in favour of the sanction, one against. The council member from Russia, who pleaded ARAF’s case as part of the meeting, was not eligible to vote. Coe called it ‘the toughest sanction we can apply at this time’, adding: ‘We discussed and agreed that the whole system has failed the athletes, not just in Russia, but around the world.’
THE statement issued by the IAAF was strongly worded and Seb Coe, the under-fire president of the world governing body, was even more forthright when he emerged from his office in London.
The Russian scandal was ‘a shameful wake-up call’ for athletics and Russia’s provisional suspension from the sport was a warning to all.
But the truth is that Russian athletes supported for years by a state-sponsored doping programme will probably be allowed to compete in the Olympic Games in Rio next summer if their country’s administrators quickly get their house in order.
When Lance Armstrong was punished for his role in what the US Anti-Doping Agency described as the most sophisticated drug programme in the history of sport, the American cyclist was banned for life. Now, however, a national federation boasting a corrupt laboratory that destroys samples and is supported by government officials, the security services and unethical doctors and coaches is free to continue the moment certain jobs are reassigned and they present themselves as ‘WADA code-compliant’.
The IAAF’s statement, issued after 22 members of their 27-strong council voted in favour of a provisional suspension with only one voting against, sounded tough. It said the suspension ‘prevents Russian athletes from participating in international competitions including World Athletic Series competitions and the Olympic Games’. And it added that Russia will not be entitled to host the 2016 World Race Walking Cup and 2016 World Junior Championships.
Race walking and junior athletics is not the Olympics, though, and one is still left with the feeling that Coe and his fellow council members simply lack the courage to take on a country as powerful and as influential as Russia and issue a punishment that would actually act as a deterrent.
This, after all, is not a problem confined to the Russians. Dick Pound, who led the independent WADA commission that has uncovered evidence of a state-run doping programme, said as much in Geneva on Monday.
Sadly, however, Pound also thought it only fair to give Russia a chance to become ‘code-compliant’ in time for Rio. So if Kenya or any other country find themselves the subject of a fresh investigation when what remains of the Pound report is published, they need not panic too much.
Coe got one thing right. The system has failed the athletes, and nowhere more so than at the summit of the governing body.
‘If former IAAF president Lamine Diack and other senior officials were accepting bribes to conceal the positive tests of Russian drug cheats, what chance did anyone have? It leaves Coe with the task of leading the sport out of an unprecedented crisis, saddled by his allegiance to Diack and his refusal, even now, to give up a paid role as a brand ambassador for Nike when it is so obviously a conflict of interest.
It undermines even the boldest statements he endeavours to deliver and makes us doubt his commitment to addressing the issues the threaten the very future of his sport. Yes, a ‘provisional suspension’ was as far as the IAAF could go last night. But a provisional statement that leaves the door open to compete in Rio wasn’t nearly tough enough.
In his statement Coe said: ‘This has been a shameful wake-up call and we are clear that cheating at any level will not be tolerated.’ And the IAAF council will meet again later this month and propose turning a provisional suspension into a full suspension.
But the message to Russia in the same statement was clear. ‘Fulfil a list of criteria’ and they will be welcomed back to the IAAF, even if they will first have to meet the standards set by a yet-to-beappointed inspection team that will be led Norwegian anti-doping expert Rune Andersen.
The Russians certainly saw it as a positive. Vitaly Mutko, the controversial sports minister implicated in the scandal, said he did not think it would take long to meet the IAAF’s demands.
Coe, meanwhile, announced that Paul Deighton, the former UK government minister who worked alongside him at the helm of the London Olympics, had been recruited to oversee a programme of reforms at the IAAF. Clean athletes training their hardest for Rio are unlikely to be too impressed.