Coe attack on BBC only masks the real issues for athletics
Going after TV’S Gabby Logan in the week when one of world’s leading coaches was banned in a doping scandal is a bad call by IAAF chief
How sad that it should take an athlete, not the man at the top, to react with a level of fury over Salazar
In his time-honoured habit of using phrasings that later return to slap him in the face, Lord Coe once vowed that he would “die in a ditch for the right of the media to question my motives, and to call to task the sport of which I am head”. So far in Doha, after a week when athletics has been pilloried for everything from pitiful crowds to a doping scandal involving a coach Coe described as a good friend, there has been little sign of him going to such extreme lengths, in ditches or otherwise, for his act of martyrdom.
Instead, in the clearest case of playing the woman rather than the ball since a Cameroon player used Steph Houghton for kicking practice at this summer’s World Cup, the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations has gone after Gabby Logan. Irked that the BBC presenter should have the temerity to highlight the swathes of empty seats, he said: “It’s very easy to sit there and make all sorts of Gabby Logan-type judgments over three or four days and clear off back to Match of the Day.”
Clearly, Coe had decided that attack was the best form of defence. But in aiming his fire at Logan – a popular anchor whose offence was to have asked pointed questions of Jon Ridgeon, his chief executive at the IAAF – he made himself look petty and peevish. If his beef with the BBC is about their mentions of how few are attending his event, he could just as easily have targeted Denise Lewis, who accused the governing body of letting down athletes. Or Michael Johnson, who argued pithily that Coe was “full of s---”. Being fellow Olympic champions, their views should resonate with him. He preferred, though, to name-check only Logan, as if the crowds story had merely been cooked up by fair-weather journalists.
In truth, the low attendances are a smokescreen. They now appear part of a “dead cat” strategy, to use a term attributed to Conservative election guru Lynton Crosby, that diverts attention away from the far more damaging topic of Alberto Salazar’s four-year ban for doping violations.
On the Salazar issue, Coe knows he is compromised. He can hardly condemn the exiled coach with any conviction, aware that he has spoken warmly of his friendship with a man he has known for 40 years. Equally, his historic association with Nike, Salazar’s loyal backer, runs so deep that at the company’s Portland headquarters, there is still a six-storey office block called the Seb Coe Building.
So, here we are, in a situation where Coe delivers greater public censure to a TV personality than to a figure who has just been slung out of the sport for administering banned substances and tampering with the doping system. It leaves an unpleasant taste. What makes the matter doubly perverse is that in criticising the BBC, Coe has ignored the most egregious element of the broadcaster’s coverage: namely, Paula Radcliffe’s suggestion that the US Anti-doping Agency’s investigation into Salazar was a face-saving exercise.
“We talk about how much money has gone into this investigation,” Radcliffe said. “I think Usada were maybe trying to regain face after the Christian Coleman fiasco.” Hers is a nonsensical thesis. The Coleman case was brought only last month, when Usada alleged that the sprinter had committed three whereabouts failures in 12 months, a charge it later dropped. The inquiry into Salazar had been going on for four years, ever since a Panorama documentary revealed the degree of athlete unease about the coach’s methods.
It is a grim statement that Radcliffe is calling out Usada, as opposed to Salazar, in all this. She should surely be condemning a coach found guilty of doling out performance-enhancing drugs, a verdict Salazar still vigorously disputes. Could her reluctance to do so be connected to her sponsorship with Nike? Or with the fact that she is married to the coach of Mo Farah, Salazar’s most successful athlete? Viewers have already demanded to know whether these interests should have been declared for the sake of BBC impartiality.
On it goes, this web of worryingly cosy relationships. If it is not Radcliffe seeking to defend the indefensible, it is Steve Cram scrambling to offer any rationalisation for having called Usada’s focus on Salazar a “witch-hunt”. Cram is a fine commentator, but hopelessly conflicted as a spokesman for his sport. He attempted to become chairman of UK Athletics, failing to see how the role might diminish his objectivity at the BBC. And at one of Coe’s Diamond League press conferences, Cram was there not as inquisitor but as moderator, cutting short awkward questions about Caster Semenya.
It took not Coe, not Cram, but American 1500 metres runner Jenny Simpson to express the requisite outrage about Salazar. “Get him out,” she said. “If you cheat, you get banned. I’m a believer in lifetime bans. I wish it was longer. Don’t cheat.” How sad that it should take an athlete, not the man at the top, to react with this level of fury.
Alas, Coe, not for the first time, is allowing political calculation to scramble his better judgment. These championships have brought home the sheer number of problems that athletics faces to retain relevance and credibility. Coe should realise that he has far greater fires to fight than a spat with Gabby Logan.