THE athletics world is set to reel again when the second report of Dick Pound’s World Anti-Doping Agency commission is published today in Munich, but even before that, devastating new allegations of cover-ups and collusion involving the Russian authorities and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) have been made.
The Associated Press has discovered that doping tests known to the IAAF contained evidence of cheating on a grand scale by Russia even prior to the London Olympics, but the world governing body refused to take action.
It was only after the Wada Commission disclosed their findings late last year that the IAAF acted to suspend Russia from all competition, including the Rio Olympics this year unless Russia’s athletics federation is overhauled, with most experts agreeing that cannot happen before the summer.
Emails, letters and reports showed that in 2011, test results weren’t enough on their own to sanction Russian athletes, but according to IAAF president Lord Sebastian Coe and other council members in that period, they were not even aware that there was a problem with Russia.
IAAF officials most certainly were. The most devastating revelation is that Pierre Weiss, the IAAF general secretary from 2006-11, wrote a letter to Valentin Balakhnichev, the Russian athletics president banned for life from the sport last week, in October 2009 following the introduction of a new blood testing regime.
According to Weiss, the tested Russians “recorded some of the highest values ever seen since the IAAF started testing”.
Weiss wrote: “This matter of the Russian athletes’ blood levels is now so serious and is not getting any better (in fact possibly getting worse) that immediate and drastic action is needed.
“Not only are these athletes cheating their fellow competitors but at these levels are putting their health and even their own lives in very serious danger.”
Other allegations made yesterday were that the IAAF officials may have helped Russia cover up the doping scandal by punishing lesser known athletes and hand-ling other matters in private.
Those proposals were never put into place, the IAAF said yesterday, though the very fact that they were even discussed calls into question the veracity of IAAF officials’ claims that they knew nothing about any Russian doping problem.
Further letters and emails show that an internal briefing estimated that 42 per cent of Russian top-level athletes were involved in doping, and that as far back as 2009, Russian competitors were evading tests by saying they were in the military and could not tell testers where they were.
Weiss said yesterday: “We always said we had problems with Russia. We didn’t have any proof that the federation was on the side of the doping. Wada found out more than we could ever find ourselves. Suspicion is not enough to suspend people.”
The only defence for the IAAF is that the doping and cover up took place under the regime of former president Lamine Diack.
Diack currently faces bribery, corruption and money laundering charges in France, where he is accused of taking more than $1.1m in a scheme to blackmail athletes and cover up doping.
Last week, the IAAF ethics commission issued a lifetime ban to Diack’s son Papa Massata Diack,
Valentin Balakhnichev and Alexei Melnikov, ex-head coach of Russia’s race-walking and long-distance running programmes.
Pound has hinted that today’s report which concentrates on the IAAF’s role, will have a “wow factor”. He said: “People will say ‘how on earth could this happen?’ It’s a complete betrayal of what the people in charge of the sport should be doing.”
It appears Lord Coe and colleagues will be facing even more tough questioning about what exactly they knew and when.
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