IAAF should have been ‘more alert’: Coe

The IAAF should have been “more alert” during events that eventually saw world athletics’ governing body suspend Russia over state-sponsored doping, according to Sebastian Coe.

Coe, writing in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper, was elected president of the IAAF in August after spending eight years as deputy to Lamine Diack, who is being investigated by French police on suspicion of having taken more than one million euros in payments to cover up positive drugs tests.

Citing the Edmund Burke quote which says ‘It is necessary only for good men to do nothing for evil to triumph’, Coe wrote in the Telegraph: “It is an observation that stabs between the ribs, and something that I have thought about restlessly and incessantly over the past awful week for athletics.

“The best way to protect clean athletes is to be unflinching in our commitment to them and not just in words.

“We have to create structures that are always in their corner and here none of us come out very well, including my federation. The architecture of anti-doping has failed them.” In August, Coe had referred to claims about suspicious blood profiles involving some athletes as “a declaration of war on my sport”.

But in his column, he recognised the role of a German television documentary in leading to the three investigations which exposed Russia’s wrongdoing.