Top global athletics official and former Dutch pentathlete Sylvia Barlag said she took up her role at the IAAF in '11 with her "eyes wide open" about problems of doping, but found efforts to reform the organization "parried at every turn," according to Mitch Phillips of REUTERS. Barlag "was speaking ahead of an anti-doping agency report expected to criticize IAAF handling of a doping scandal that has shaken the sport." She said,
"I felt sad and angry and now it feels as if we are waiting to be slaughtered (by Thursday’s report), but it's better that it has all come out." Barlag, after sharing the same track as IAAF President Sebastian Coe at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, "now stands shoulder to shoulder" with him in seeking radical reform to save it from the "biggest crisis in the sport's history." Barlag said several Council colleagues "had expressed concerns that the world body was failing to deal with the growing issue of doping."
Barlag: "I was warned but still surprised when I found out how frustrating it was that the questions we were trying to ask weren't producing answers." She said that "she was confident Coe was the right man to clean up the sport," though critics pointed to a failure to recognize Lamine Diack’s corruption in his eight-year role as a VP. Barlag:
"I think he’s taken the right measures straight away. He's been punished by the media for taking so long (when he was VP) but he couldn't have started until he was elected" (REUTERS, 1/12).
NEW IDEAS: In London, Ben Bloom wrote UK Athletics Chair Ed Warner "hit out" at the IAAF as he released a 14-point "Manifesto for Clean Athletics," suggesting that "the lawyers look like they are running the show." The manifesto "controversially suggested drawing a line under all pre-existing world records and starting anew." Warner: "I’m concerned that not enough imagination is being applied to the future of the sport as opposed to correcting the sins of the past and stabilizing the organization. We need collectively as a sport to think more radically. We’ve got 14 ideas here and some of them are more left field than others but they are all intended to provoke debate. They are designed to be a cattle prod for the whole sport of athletics and very specifically the IAAF" (TELEGRAPH, 1/11).
