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IAAF Chief Coe Faces Doping Showdown With MPs

IAAF Chief Coe Faces Doping Showdown With MPs

Lord Coe faces a grilling from MPs later as he tries to shore up his troubled leadership of athletics' world governing body.

It is almost 20 years since Lord Coe was an MP, but his appearance in front of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee could be as bruising as any in his spell in Westminster.

At a previous hearing on allegations levelled by the Sunday Times and German broadcaster ARD that evidence of blood doping by hundreds of athletes had been ignored, MPs were clearly sceptical of the IAAF's role in the affair.

The Sunday Times story, published days before he stood for election as IAAF President, enraged Lord Coe. He described it as a "declaration of war" on the sport.

The words might have been aimed at his electorate, distrustful of the British media, but they proved to be a striking misstep, and not the last from a man usually so sure-footed in between the shadowy salons of sports politics and the real world.

Last week he was forced to give up his £100,000-a-year consultancy with Nike as it continued to overshadow his attempts to get to grips with the deep crisis afflicting the sport.

The revelation of state-sponsored doping in Russia, the arrest of his predecessor Lamine Diack on suspicion of corruption, and an unfolding corruption and doping crisis in Kenya have all somewhat eclipsed the original Sunday Times story.

But it is this Lord Coe will aim to address. Whether a committee of hostile MPs with form for grandstanding is the forum to bring the best out of him is another matter.

The principal witness at the first hearing was Michael Ashenden, a renowned blood-doping expert retained by the Sunday Times, whose analysis of a leaked database of 11 years worth of blood samples was at the heart of the story.

Last week the IAAF issued a 22-page rebuttal of his evidence, claiming it was scientifically and logically flawed. The reasons are, as with almost every aspect of blood doping and its detection, hugely complex and open to interpretation.

Lord Coe will say his experts and legal advisers are right and that in the overwhelming majority of cases they pursued cheating where it was detected and they could nail a case.

He will try to draw a distinction between these, and the cases where the IAAF’s former head of anti-doping Gabriel Dolle, now under criminal investigation, may have had a hand in delaying or covering up positive samples, as French prosecutors allege.

Whether anyone will listen to his general point, given the specific abuses revealed in the last two months, remains to be seen.