Cloud of Corruption and Doping Hangs Worldwide

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/01/sports/kenyan-track-doping-suspension-iaaf-hamburg-olympics.html

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The blows to sports credibility keep coming.

Three leading Kenyan track-and-field officials on Monday were provisionally suspended by the I.A.A.F. pending an investigation into allegations that they subverted the antidoping program in Kenya and diverted sponsorship funds received from Nike.

The suspensions came the day after yet another major European city — Hamburg, Germany — voted against bidding for the Olympics, leaving four candidates in the race for the 2024 Summer Games: Los Angeles, Paris, Budapest and Rome.

Though there was no direct linkage between the Kenyan and German developments, the climate of skepticism about governing bodies and the sports they govern probably did play a role in the close Hamburg referendum, in which 51.6 percent voted no.

The rejection came after public-opinion polls last year showed a clear majority of Hamburg residents in favor of the bid and also came after the International Olympic Committee approved broad-based changes in December that were intended to make bidding more appealing to sophisticated, cost-conscious cities just like Hamburg.

Yet Hamburg still joined the list of Olympic naysayers, following Munich; Krakow, Poland; and the Swiss cities of Davos and St. Moritz, all of which voted no in referendums before the I.O.C. reforms. That list does not include Oslo, which pulled out of the 2022 Winter Olympic chase because of public opposition, or Boston, which pulled out of the 2024 race, for the same reason, before a scheduled referendum.

There were multiple factors at work in Hamburg, including concern in Germany about the financial and social implications of the refugee crisis in Europe. But Thomas Bach, the German who is president of the I.O.C., also acknowledged in a statement that the no vote “may have been influenced by regrettable incidents with regard to doping and corruption in other sports organizations.”

It is quite a litany of shame and avarice at this stage between the full-blown FIFA and I.A.A.F. crises and reports that German officials offered inducements to FIFA officials in Germany’s successful bid for the 2006 World Cup.

In that same vein, the I.A.A.F. ethics committee revealed on Monday that Isaiah Kiplagat, the president of Athletics Kenya, had been accused of receiving two motor vehicles as a gift from the Qatar Association of Athletics Federation in 2014 and 2015. David Okeyo, vice president of Athletics Kenya and an I.A.A.F. Council member, and Joseph Kinyua, the former treasurer of Athletics Kenya and Kenya’s team leader at the 2015 world championships in Beijing, were also suspended.

Doha, Qatar, successfully bid for the 2019 world track and field championships in November 2014. The I.A.A.F. ethics committee statement, which made no correlation between the alleged gift and the 2019 bidding process, did not make clear whether the vehicles in question had been given to Kiplagat personally or to the Kenyan federation.

Buying votes in an election would be a damning accusation, but not as damning in a sporting context as corrupting an antidoping program.

Welcome back to the I.A.A.F.’s deeply compromised world. Its former president Lamine Diack, who stepped away in August after 16 years, has been charged in France with corruption and money laundering, allegedly receiving payments in exchange for suppressing positive drug tests.

Russia, one of the sport’s traditional powers, has been suspended from international track and field competition after a World Anti-Doping Agency report confirmed accusations of state-sponsored doping that included cover-ups of positive tests, and efforts to extort money from athletes who had tested positive.

In a sport as global as track and field, where champions can and do come from six continents, an antidoping program is clearly only as strong as its weakest link. But if the latest allegations prove true, two of the most obvious and important links — Russia and Kenya — were not just weak but broken.

“In my view, any antidoping system that allowed this to happen needs wholesale change,” said Richard Ings, the former chief executive of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority. “Remember, it was the media, not the system, that picked up these issues. Indeed, the system for some time pushed back on the media message, so any system that allows this type of conduct to occur is a flawed system.

“There are several hundred antidoping organizations, or ADOs, all responsible for managing their little piece of global antidoping,” Ings said. “Each of those ADOs has the ability to be judge and jury on athlete cases. Oversight is poor and sporadic. ADOs are never held accountable for their own compliance with the system. This is the incubator for fraud, and it has to be wholesale addressed.”

Though it is encouraging that WADA and the I.A.A.F. are acting and investigating, it would have been a great deal more convincing if all this had come to light via internal inquiries rather than via external investigations by news organizations.

It also would have been more convincing if Sebastian Coe, the new president of the I.A.A.F., had decided to end his long-term paid association with Nike before public pressure turned into an outcry. But at least Coe finally acted last week to announce the end an apparent conflict of interest that was apparent to everyone but him.

“It is clear that perception and reality have become horribly mangled,” he said at I.A.A.F. Council meetings in Monaco. “The current noise level around this ambassadorial role is not good for the I.A.A.F., and it is not good for Nike. And frankly, it is a distraction to the 18-hour days that I and our teams are working to steady the ship.”

Though welcome, this was not much of a mea culpa. I pressed Coe twice on this issue in interviews, once in New York before the I.A.A.F. presidential election and once shortly after he won the election in Beijing. In both instances, he expressed confidence that safeguards were in place and that by declaring the Nike connection, he was being unusually transparent. He said he had successfully juggled multiple roles, including his Nike connection, as head of the successful 2012 London Olympics. Coe also made it clear he needed an income. The I.A.A.F. presidency is an unpaid post, something Coe said he was not pushing to change.

He clearly will have to remain nimble with his appearance before a British parliamentary committee that is set to begin Wednesday and with WADA’s investigative committee set to release more findings related to Diack and the I.A.A.F. in the months ahead.

There is also the issue of the 2021 World Championships, awarded to Eugene, Ore., without formal bidding in April, with Diack the driving force behind the unusual approach.

There were strong arguments for Eugene, a rare track hotbed in the United States, which has never staged a world outdoor championships despite being the sport’s leading nation. Eugene had lost to Doha in the bidding for 2019.

But with Diack’s credibility at an all-time low and with Nike headquarters in nearby Beaverton, Ore., the I.A.A.F. and the bidding committee are, at best, in another awkward position, even if TrackTown officials in Eugene have said that Nike played no formal role in the process and that the bid adhered to all legal and ethical norms.

Ultimately, it was the I.A.A.F’s decision to expedite the bidding despite protests from would-be bidders in Gothenburg, Sweden. Those protests continue, yet they are another blow for Coe and his sport to absorb. And it would be hard to blame the public at this stage for losing interest in the fight.