Reuters
London, August 5: Sebastian Coe, the former Olympic champion in the running to become the next president of the world governing body of athletics (IAAF), said Wednesday that the sport felt angry and betrayed over accusations it failed to investigate hundreds of ‘suspicious’ drug test results.
A day after the IAAF hit back at last weekend’s allegations by Britain’s ‘Sunday Times’ newspaper and Germany’s ‘ARD/WDR’ broadcaster, Coe made an impassioned defence of track and field, telling the BBC the claims were ‘a declaration of war’ on the sport.
“I don’t think anyone should underestimate the anger which is felt in our sport in the betrayal of the last few days of our sport,” Coe told ‘BBC’s World Service’.
“That in some way we sit on our hands, at best, and at worst are complicit in a cover up; that is just not borne out by anything we have done as a sport in the past 15 years.
“We have led the way on out-of-competition independent testing, we have led the way on laboratories, we were the first sport to have arbitration panels, we introduced blood passports in 2009 because we wanted to elevate the science around weeding out the cheats,” Coe added.
The 58-year-old Coe pointed to the fact that the governing body has a strong track record in rooting out cheats. “We have got some of the highest profile names out of the sport in the last few years,” he said.
