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IAAF President Sebastian Coe Steps Down From Ambassadorial Role With Nike

IAAF President Sebastian Coe has "reluctantly ditched his controversial" £100,000 ($150,000) a year role as a Nike ambassador but still maintains that "it was not a conflict of interest," according to Owen Gibson of the London GUARDIAN. Coe said that he had made the decision because "the current noise level" was becoming a "distraction from his mission to save his crisis-hit sport." Coe said, "It is clear that perception and reality have become horribly mangled. I have stepped down from the Nike position I have held for 38 years." Besieged by allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russia and corruption claims leveled at his predecessor, Lamine Diack, Coe said that "the Nike issue was interfering with his attempts to lead athletics out of its current malaise." Yet he "insisted the decision had not come as a result of growing pressure" arising from an email uncovered this week that "showed he had discussed a successful bid to host the 2021 World Athletics Championships" in Eugene, Oregon, the birthplace of Nike, with a senior exec from the sportswear company. That "information had then been passed back to the leader of the bid." Conservative MP and Culture, Media & Sport Select Committee Member Damian Collins "welcomed the decision but said there were still questions to answer over the Eugene bid" (GUARDIAN, 11/26). In London, Malcolm Moore reported Coe said that the ethics commission of the IAAF "had cleared him to continue his commercial activities." Coe added that his company, CSM, would "not tender for any work connected to athletics and he would step down as the head of the British Olympic Association after the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro." Coe: "This has been a long and historic relationship. It was one I maintained through the London Olympic years, when adidas were a partner and when I was the chairman of the British Olympic Association. It reflects my intention to focus as long and hard as I can on steadying the ship, which has been rocking rather badly recently" (FT, 11/26). 

BEGRUDGING ACCEPTANCE: In a separate piece, Owen Gibson wrote Coe's "oddly begrudging acceptance that he ought to relinquish his ambassadorial role with Nike, four months after taking over as president of world athletics and without accepting that it ever constituted a conflict of interest in the first place, struck a bum note." The calls for him to "drop the role began as soon as he won a narrow presidential vote in Beijing and have grown since." Yet Coe "seemed tetchy at being forced to give up a role with a company with which he has enjoyed links for 37 years." Since August, he has "clung to a complex technical definition of what constitutes a conflict of interest that he believed cleared him to carry on." Coe later said that he would "review his outside interests in time." But because "he has always been open about his Nike links, he believed that his track record should prove he would not be influenced" (GUARDIAN, 11/28). MARKETING MAGAZINE's Shona Ghosh reported a Nike spokesperson said, "Sebastian Coe has informed us that he will no longer be able to play a role as an ambassador for Nike. Seb has been a Nike athlete since the 1970s and we are obviously disappointed, but respect his decision" (MARKETING MAGAZINE, 11/27).

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