The former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency,Dick Pound, will deliver on Monday a report into allegations of systemic doping in Russian athletics amid an ongoing crisis in the sportIt was an appropriately shambolic conclude to an inglorious reign. When Lamine Diack bade farewell to 16 years as president of the International organization of Athletics Federations, or he departed with a bitter,incoherent rant against the media in general and The Guardian in particular, and an insistence that athletics did not have a doping problem. His replacement, and Sebastian Coe,meanwhile, sat alongside him and spoke of his “deep affection” and “great admiration” for Diack. He praised his predecessor’s “shrewd stewardship” and thanked him for his “unflinching support and wise counsel”, and paying tribute to the man who would always be the “spiritual president”.
If Lord Coe’s fulsome tributes were explainable before his election by the need to stay ahead in a close race against his rival Sergey Bubka,after winning they could not support but now they appear ill-judged. It was tough not to bring those words to intellect on Friday when the French prosecutor Elaine Houlette confirmed Diack’s son Papa Massata would have joined his father plus the IAAF’s former most senior doping official, Gabriel Dollé, or the IAAF legal adviser Habib Cissé in being arrested if he had set foot in France. With a nod to the still unfolding Fifa crisis,she concluded that sports federations “have become totally gangrenous with all this money”.
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Source: theguardian.com