It has been a rotten 12 months for the reputation of athletics. Yet the whiff around the sport is about to become more pungent. Over the next few weeks, senior figures are expected to receive life bans from track and field. Some may face prison. And the levels of the cosy corruption at the IAAF, which enabled some officials to demand money from the Russian marathon runner Liliya Shobukhova in order to cover up anomalies in her blood passport, will be blasted out in surround sound. All of which presents a fiendish problem for Seb Coe — but also, potentially, an opportunity.
The music will start playing tomorrow, when the International Association of Athletics Federations’ ethics commission begins a three-day disciplinary hearing under Michael Beloff QC into those officials who extorted cash from Shobukhova. It will become louder still when, in an announcement scheduled for 14 January in Munich, Dick Pound releases the second part of his report, which will skewer the IAAF in the same vigorous way that Russian athletics was. If that is not serious enough, there is the looming denouement of the French police’s criminal investigation into several IAAF figures - including the former president Lamine Diack , who is alleged to have pocketed €1mn in bribes.
We have heard a lot from Coe about restructuring but rather less about openness, and his failure to criticise the sport’s old guard deeply troubles some. As Toni Minichiello, the widely respected coach of the world champion heptathlete, Jessica Ennis-Hill, puts it: “There is still a layer of arrogance that does the IAAF no favours. And it is worrying that Coe has so far showed more outrage about journalists discovering athletes’ blood values than the alleged corruption of senior IAAF people.”
That may be because Coe has been told by the French police not to comment on those under investigation. Critics, however, fear that when it comes to sniffing out wrongdoing, he too often has a blocked-up nose.
Despite the reports from Beloff and Pound, which will again put athletics’ problems on the front pages, Coe seems reluctant to concede how serious the situation is. Last week on the Today programme he was asked whether the IAAF’s problems are as big as FIFA’s. He demurred, saying it involved only a handful of officials — but that was a nifty sidestep. In terms of people and the sums involved it is smaller but some of those under investigation — including Gabriel Dollé, the IAAF’s former head of anti-doping, Valentin Balakhnichev, the former president of the Russia Athletic Federation and IAAF treasurer, and Diack himself — are not only accused of taking bribes but also of influencing events on the field of play by allowing Shobukhova to compete when they knew she was cheating.
For all their faults, no one has accused Sepp Blatter or Michel Platini of doing something similar.
While these are troubling times, the PR expert Mark Borkowski believes Coe is smart enough to turn the organisation round. “He is in a middle of a cyclone and he will feel lonely,” he says. “But I wouldn’t write any obituaries. If he can change world athletics, we’ll be looking at him in a different way in a couple of years’ time.”
Whether Coe will live up to Borkowski’s optimism, however, remains to be seen.