By Laura Wagner
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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