The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has accepted the “extreme gravity” of the offenses revealed in an investigation of its past corruption and said it would use the recommendations in the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) report as the basis for reform of track and field’s international governing body.
The WADA report found that the IAAF was corrupted from the inside by a “powerful rogue group,” and they conspired to extort athletes and allow doping Russians to continue competing.
IAAF president Sebastian Coe, who replaced Lamine Diack in August last year, said that the track and field body “has an enormous task ahead of it to restore public confidence.”
Photo: Reuters
“The weakness of IAAF’s governance, which has been exposed, allowed individuals at the head of the previous regime at the IAAF to delay the following of normal procedures in certain doping cases,” the IAAF said in a statement released yesterday.
Coe said that the corruption revealed in the WADA report “is totally abhorrent and a gross betrayal of trust by those involved.”
He said many of the recommendations made by the WADA independent commission were already part of the reforms being put in place by the new administration, “but we will now urgently consider all of the new recommendations and will incorporate them quickly into that reform program.”
Six-time Olympic champion Usain Bolt said that he felt shocked by the scandal and that the IAAF had failed their athletes.
“When I heard, it was quite shocking for me to hear that, because as far as I was concerned, I think they were doing a good job to clean up the sport,” Bolt said. “So for me to hear something like this was quite shocking and you feel let down as an athlete to be wanting to actually help clean up the sport and then something like this to come up about the body. It is kind of a letdown, so hopefully there is no such thing, but we will see what happens [with the investigations].”
UK Athletics released “A Manifesto for Clean Athletics” on Monday, calling for world records to be wiped clean and drug cheats to be banned for at least eight years in radical proposals aimed at heralding in a new era for the sport.
However, the 29-year-old Bolt, who set the 100m and 200m world records of 9.58 seconds and 19.19 seconds respectively in 2009 and shared in the 4x100m mark of 36.84 seconds in 2012, said he was against the proposal.
“As far as I am concerned, it is really pointless,” he said. “What is done is done, you have to just move forward and try to make the upcoming championships and Olympics and the next [world] records as best as we can and just look forward to the future. You cannot worry about the past, but try to build on the future.”
Additional reporting by Reuters
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