An independent commission formed by the World Anti-Doping Agency released the second part of its damning report Thursday, detailing illicit state-sanctioned doping by track and field athletes, and corruption among top international officials.

While the first part of the report, released in November, focused mainly on wrongdoing by the Russian athletics federation (ARAF) and the Russian anti-doping agency (RUSADA), Thursday’s report centers on the corruption of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), which was found to have contributed to the corruption that allowed athletes with dirty blood tests to continue competing.

The report says that former president of the IAAF Lamine Diack “was responsible for organizing and enabling the conspiracy and corruption that took place in the IAAF.”

As the Two-Way previously reported, the institutions failed completely; athletes who had doped were even allowed to compete in the 2012 Olympic Games. The report found that Diack knew of extorting athletes to hide abnormal blood tests.

“He sanctioned and appears to have had personal knowledge of the fraud and the extortion of athletes carried out by the actions of the informal illegitimate governance structure he put in place,” the report says.

But it also says that the illegal activity went beyond Diack.

“The corruption was embedded in the organization. It cannot be ignored or dismissed as attributable to the odd renegade acting on its own,” the report said.

It went on to assert that “at least some of the members of the IAAF Council could not have been unaware of the extent of doping in Athletics and the non-enforcement of applicable anti-doping rules.”

In the wake of WADA’s first report, the IAAF ethics committee handed down three lifetime bans last week (including to the former president of Russia’s athletic federation) and one five-year ban to the former head of the IAAF’s anti-doping unit.

At the time, Russian Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko said he thought the IAAF announced the bans to help its own image and distract from the looming publication of the second part of WADA’s report, according to Reuters.

Now that the second installment of the report has been published, Mutko said he “supported all the outcomes” of the investigation and understood Russia’s share of the responsibility for the doping scandal, the news service said, citing the Tass news agency.

With the IAAF now in the spotlight, it will be up to the current president, Sebastian Coe of Britain, to take the next steps.

Dick Pound, a former WADA president said Coe was the right person to lead the organization, according to the Associated Press.

“There’s [an] enormous amount of reputational recovery that has to occur here and I can’t … think of anyone better than Lord Coe to lead that. All our fingers are crossed in that respect.”

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Hall of Fame center fielder Willie Mays was once quoted as saying, “I think I was the best baseball player I ever saw.”

But when it came to life off the field, the legendary player credits his former teammate and fellow Hall of Famer Monte Irvin with being his teacher. Irvin died Monday at his home in Houston at the age of 96. Mays, now 84, spoke to NPR’s Kelly McEvers about the man he described as a father figure.

“He taught me a lot things about life,” Mays said. “I already knew how to play the game, but sometimes you need a little more. You need to know how to treat people. You need to know how when you hit a home run, you run around the bases — you don’t stop and show anybody up. Thinking was more important to him than just playing the game.”

For much of his career, Irvin played in the Negro Leagues with the Newark Eagles. When he finally reached Major League Baseball in 1949, two years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, he was already 30 years old. Still, his skill was undeniable.

“He had what I call a very good arm, ran very good, good hitter and most of all thinking,” Mays said. “He was a good thinker in the outfield and that sometimes is overlooked.”

When Mays entered MLB in 1951, he joined Irvin on the New York Giants, where, he said, the older man’s guidance was invaluable.

“When I came up in ’51, Monte taught me a lot of things about life in the big city — well, I call it the Big Apple, New York. I learned very quickly because I had to play the games in the Polo Grounds,” he said. “So Monte was there playing alongside of me at all times, and it was just a wonderful feeling to have someone in the outfield with me to make sure I didn’t make a lot of mistakes out there.”

Willie Mays pictured in 1967. AP hide caption

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Mays, Irvin and Hank Thompson went on to form the first all-black outfield in Game 1 of the 1951 World Series against the Yankees. It was a huge moment for baseball. For Mays? Not so much.

“To me it wasn’t, because I knew those guys … it wasn’t anything different. It made me proud to be a part of that particular unit at that particular time.”

When Irvin was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1973 he acknowledged that he “wasted [his] best years in the Negro Leagues.”

But he added: “I’m philosophical about it. There’s no point in being bitter. You’re not happy with the way things happen, but why make yourself sick inside? There were many guys who could really play who never got a chance at all.”

It was this thoughtfulness that stuck with Mays. When asked about what he will miss about Irvin, Mays said simply, “the man.”

“He was a guy that was sort of like my father. … There was a park by his house there, we would go out and just talk, nothing specific, just talk, mostly about life.”

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After months of planning, maneuvering and dealing, NFL team owners have voted 30-2 in favor of relocating the St. Louis Rams to Los Angeles, while leaving open the option for the San Diego Chargers to share the facility.

Three teams — the Rams, the Chargers and the Oakland Raiders — have spent the past year vying to move to Los Angeles. Not only do the team owners say their stadiums are out of date, but they claim their current cities are unwilling to allocate enough public money to help build new ones. Plus, Los Angeles offers a much larger, greener media market than any of the other cities.

Ultimately, after a long day of presentations, debate and voting in a Houston hotel, Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s proposed $1.86 billion stadium in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles, won 30 votes, surpassing the requisite 24-vote threshold. The funding for the Inglewood stadium will come from Kroenke and other private donors.

The approved plan also leaves room for the Chargers, owned by Dean Spanos, to share the stadium in Inglewood.

The compromise was struck after two previous plans failed to garner enough support. Kroenke’s plan to move the Rams alone to Inglewood fell short, as did the proposal from the Chargers’ Spanos and Raiders owner Mark Davis to build a shared stadium in Carson, Calif., another Los Angeles suburb.

The city of St. Louis had offered $150 million in public money to go toward a new $1.1 billion riverfront stadium, with the rest of the money coming from the state, team owner and NFL. In all, 40 percent of the stadium would have come from public money. Kroenke, however, was not satisfied with the deal, and the league evidently agreed with him. NFL rules stipulate against relocation if a viable stadium proposal has been presented in the team’s current city.

San Diego also had offered money for a new stadium to keep the Chargers in the city. San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer said: “The more San Diego has done the less engaged the Chargers have become. San Diegans deserve better.”

In fact, of the three teams, Oakland — unwilling to allocate more taxpayer money toward a stadium — was the only one not to offer the NFL a plan for financing a stadium in its current city.

The current deal gives the Chargers the ability to continue to negotiate with the city of San Diego for a more advantageous stadium-financing plan, while keeping the option of moving to the shared stadium in Inglewood. The other team owners also win, as it is expected that the moving teams will each pay a $550 million relocation fee. The real loser of the deal is the Raiders’ Davis, who is left with little leverage for a better stadium deal in Oakland.

Upon the Rams’ return to Los Angeles (they played in the area from 1946 to 1994), the team will play in a temporary facility until the new stadium is ready, most likely for the 2019 season.

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