International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) officials, including the body’s current President Sebastian Coe, should have acted quicker to remedy problems in the organisation, the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s (WADA) Independent Commission Richard Pound has claimed.
The Canadian claimed Coe and other officials, including senior IAAF vice-president Sergey Bubka, could have changed elements of the world governing body’s outdated governance structure, even if they had not directly known about the alleged wrongdoing of Coe’s Presidential predecessor, Lamine Diack.
Diack was arrested in November in a French police investigation after claims he was involved in accepting bribes from Russia to cover-up failed doping cases.
Pound cited the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Salt Lake City corruption scandal in 1998 to outline the importance of pre-empting problems.
“Coe and Bubka were there,” Pound told The Times.
“It’s easy enough if you want to get a governance review.
“They had a [19th-century] constitution in a 21st-century organisation.
“They had an opportunity a long time ago to address issues of governance, and you saw from the IOC what happens if you don’t do that – you get your t**s in the wringer.
“It’s easy [to change things] in a generalised way without attacking who’s sitting as President.
“I’d have thought they’d say, ‘It’s 2015, we should be doing something’.”
