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Former Doping Chief Pound Says IAAF President Sebastian Coe Failed His Sport

IAAF President Sebastian Coe has been criticized "for acting too slowly to reform athletics by the man leading the investigation into corruption inside the sport’s world governing body," according to Rick Broadbent of the LONDON TIMES. Dick Pound, chairman of the independent commission that will deliver another "damning report" next Thursday, said that Coe "should have done more when he was vice-president to Lamine Diack." The Senegalese has been accused of "active corruption" by French magistrates on suspicion that he took €1M ($1.09M) in bribes to cover up drug violations. Diack "has denied all allegations." Pound said of Diack’s VPs, "Coe and [Sergey] Bubka were there. It’s easy enough if you want to get a governance review. They had a [19th-century] constitution in a 21st-century organization. They had an opportunity a long time ago to address issues of governance, and you saw from the International Olympic Committee what happens if you don’t do that -- you get your t**s in the wringer." It is believed that Coe, who could "justifiably counter" that he did make a significant governance change by setting up the IAAF Ethics Commission, "will not be directly criticised in the report of the panel, which was appointed by the World Anti-Doping Agency." Pound praised athletics administrators for the speed with which they banned Russia after the commission’s report, but rejected Coe’s warning of a witch-hunt against clean athletes, saying, "If the IAAF does not acknowledge it had a problem, then it will be hard to put in place the changes they need to make" (LONDON TIMES, 1/8). In a separate piece, Broadbent wrote Pound, the founding president of WADA, said that "the scandal engulfing" the IAAF is worse than FIFA’s "bonfire of vanities." This "is about money and cheating, rather than just money." The second part of the panel’s report will focus on "corruption and bribery practices at the highest levels of international athletics." The evidence "has been passed to Interpol." You wonder "if things can get worse." Coe’s "dream job as IAAF president has become swathed in gloom," but this week he preempted Pound’s report by revealing that his blueprint to clean up his sport included doubling the anti-doping budget to $8M, and the number of athletes in the testing pool to 1,000. Pound said, "My guess is [the IAAF] have anticipated our report. If they want to get in front, that’s fine. I don’t care how we get a solution, as long as we do. If they feel good by saying, ‘We already agreed to do that,’ the fact is they only agreed because of these revelations." But "worse than" FIFA? Pound: "The number of zeroes is smaller but the impact is on the field and that’s serious." Pound "has never been afraid to speak his mind, ruffling feathers and lobbing grenades in pursuit of cleaner sport." He "was not about to be shocked by proof of widespread doping in Russia." Pound said, "Everyone ‘knew,’ in inverted commas, about Russia and the former Soviet Union republics. You know it, but you can’t prove it. It’s not a surprise, but the level of detail we uncovered was interesting" (LONDON TIMES, 1/8). In London, Ben Rumsby wrote with the final installment of the report focusing on bribery and corruption within the IAAF itself, the governing body "might also have found itself declared ‘non-compliant’ with the Wada code this week." All but ruling out the "ultimate sanction," Pound added, "The idea in all this is to try to get people to behave properly and to make it very tough not to behave properly." To that end, sport’s "most zealous crusader in the war on drugs" promises "there will be recommendations" in Thursday’s report that could "still heap misery on the crisis-plagued sport." One "could be to ban for life" Coe’s predecessor Diack (TELEGRAPH, 1/9). In London, Matt Lawton wrote two of Coe’s closest aides "emerged as key witnesses in the corruption scandal that has now resulted in life bans for three senior officials and a five-year suspension for the former head of the IAAF’s anti-doping division." Huw Roberts, the man appointed by Coe to be the organization’s senior legal counsel, "was among the first to raise the alarm in January 2013." And even before that, Thomas Capdevielle, an IAAF doping official, "voiced his concern that former London Marathon winner Liliya Shobukhova was competing in the 2012 Olympics when he had known since late 2011 that she should have been facing a doping ban." Their concerns "were highlighted in a 118-page report published by the IAAF ethics commission on Thursday and later that night the governing body sought to explain why Roberts and Capdevielle did not raise the issue externally" (DAILY MAIL, 1/7).

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