By REBECCA R. RUIZ
January 14, 2016
Top officials running the sport of track and field have for years abused their positions and possibly engaged in criminal behavior, blackmailing athletes who doped and failing to discipline them in a timely fashion, according to a report released on Thursday by the World Anti-Doping Agency.
The 89-page[1] report[2] was the result of an investigation by a task force that spent the last year examining accusations of widespread doping and corruption. It raised questions about past leaders of the sport who were already under criminal investigation as well as the sport's celebrated current leader, Sebastian Coe, a two-time Olympi c gold medalist who was in charge of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
Speaking at a news conference in Munich, Dick Pound, a lead author of the report, seemed to both implicate Mr. Coe, who was in the audience, while also defending him. "Giving an opinion as to whether he lied or not," Mr. Pound said, assessing Mr. Coe's knowledge of the extent of the corruption: "I'd say he didn't lie."
The first part of the group's inquiry concluded in November, with a report that accused Russia of a state-sponsored doping program[3]. Those findings prompted track and field's governing body to suspend[4] Russia from global competition, jeopardizing its participation in this summer's Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
The investigation's second[5] report, released Thursday[6] in Munich, shifted attention from Russia to the ruling body overseeing the sport global ly: the International Association of Athletics Federations.
Well before the antidoping commission's investigation, the I.A.A.F. knew the extent of Russia's drug abuse, Mr. Pound said. Top officials, the inquiry found, were complicit in keeping tainted athletes in competition, extorting money from athletes and delaying the processing of drug test violations.
Unlike Russian coaches, trainers, doctors and the state police — whom the commission accused of actively destroying drug samples — I.A.A.F. officials did not erase records but rather delayed processing them, expecting that inaction might make matters go away, the inquiry found.
The report raised new questions about how compromised sports officials can be in investigating and disciplining doping violations, calling the corruption "embedded" in the organization. "It cannot be ignored or dismissed as attributable to the odd renegade acting on his own," it read. "It is increasingly clear that far more I.A.A.F. staff knew about the problems than has currently been acknowledged."
Implicated are the organization's longtime president until last August, Lamine Diack, who was re-elected by the I.A.A.F. congress four times, and its former treasurer, Valentin Balakhnichev of Russia, along with high-ranking advisers, including a lawyer and medical doctor once in charge of policing doping violations.
In a statement on Thursday, the I.A.A.F. said that it accepted the "extreme gravity" of the report's findings, noting that weak governance had allowed "individuals at the head of a previous regime" to act poorly.
In a separate statement, Mr. Coe called the corruption "totally abhorrent," adding, "We cannot change the past, but I am determined that we will learn from it and will not repeat its mistakes."
Mr. Diack, of Senegal, solicited illegal payments in exchange for delayed processing of paperwork, the report said, and in at least one instance advised a lawyer he needed to consult the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin, who had become a friend, regarding the doping violations of nine Russian athletes.
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He presided over the I.A.A.F. for 16 years, hiring his two sons as consultants and drawing them into his schemes, the inquiry found. Mr. Balakhnichev, too, installed his son as an I.A.A.F. employee in Moscow.
Authorities have reacted to the commission's yearlong inquiry. Mr. Diack is under criminal investigation in France, authorities there announced last year, as are Habib Cisse, Mr. Diack's legal adviser, and Gabriel Dollé, a former director of the I.A.A.F.'s antidoping division. None are currently working for the I.A.A.F.
French authorities are continuing their investigation into the matter, they announced Thursday. Interpol, the international police organization, is also leading a continuing global inquiry. The organization has put out a wanted notice for one of Mr. Diack's sons, Papa Massata Diack, who worked as a marketing consultant. Last week, the I.A.A.F. announced that it had barred him for life from future work in track and field.
Although Thursday's report said members of the I.A.A.F.'s council "could not have been unaware" of the alleged schemes as they occurred, Mr. Pound emphasized at the news conference that he believed the organization's current leader, Mr. Coe, had not been a part of any wrongdoing and had not known about it.
Mr. Coe was vice president to Mr. Diack for seven years and has denied any knowledge of nefarious activity at the I.A.A.F.
On Thursday, Mr. Pound attributed the schemes to an "institutional failure," adding, "I don't want to lay the failures of an entire council and its governance process at the feet of one individual."
Mr. Coe has recognized in recent weeks that the sport and his organization are in crisis. Last week, perhaps acting pre-emptively as the results of Mr. Pound's inquiry were anticipated, he announced that he had hired a team of outside lawyers and accountants to conduct an internal investigation at the I.A.A.F. and that he planned to institute stricter organizational controls and double the antidoping budget by midyear.
"I represent a sport under intense scrutiny," Mr. Coe said in a statement last week. "Be under no illusion about how seriously I take these issues."
The three-person commission that wrote Thursday's report was created in December 2014. It consisted of Mr. Pound, founding president of the World Anti-Doping Agency; Richard H. McLaren, a Canadian lawyer; and Günter Younger, the head of cybercrime for the police in the German state Bavaria.
The commission's investigation was inspired by reports from the German public broadcaster ARD, which released a documentary in December 2014 focused on doping in Russian athletics.
In August, ARD and The Sunday Times of London released a second report regarding the leaked results of thousands of blood tests of international athletes dating to 2001. Those results showed one in seven athletes had abnormal blood test results — reportedly including decorated athletes with clean records and prompting the antidoping commission to widen the focus of its inquiry.
In its report, the commission said it had reviewed all blood tests from 2001 to 2015 and found that the I.A.A.F. had, in fact, done a fine job in following up on suspicious tests. The report concluded that the leaked data was not grounds on which to conclude that an athlete had or had not used drugs, and that in most suspicious cases, the I.A.A.F. had ordered follow-up urine tests, required of athletes whose blood tests suggest doping.
The report's message was of a corrupt administration more than an international culture of widespread cheating among athletes.
Invoking scandals at FIFA, world soccer's governing body, and the International Olympic Committee, Mr. Pound said the significance of the I.A.A.F.'s corruption was unique in affecting the outcome of competitions.
"It's not just a bunch of people sitting at a table passing money to each other," he said. "You've got to have 21st-century governance even if it's an organization that's 19th century in origin."
