IAAF doping row: Sebatian Coe has 48 hours to prove he’s the man to save athletics

The Last Word: The IAAF president must give people a reason to believe in the sport before it is too late

IAAF president Sebastian Coe (Getty Images)

Enough is enough. The stench of institutionalised corruption is so nauseating, the sense of betrayal so complete, that the challenge to Sebastian Coe must be uncompromising, and expressed with brutal clarity.

He has 48 hours to prove he is the man to save his sport, to verify he is worthy of trust and reconciliation. He must address understandable accusations that he is part of athletics’ problem, rather than the answer to its existential crisis.

Lamine Diack, the predecessor to whom he pledged grotesque allegiance as “my spiritual president”, is alleged to have been centrally involved in what amounts to a protection racket, featuring the covering up of failed drug tests. The implications of that ultimate obscenity, profiteering from cheats at the expense of competitors committed to the sport’s supposed purity, will be reinforced by the publication in Geneva tomorrow of an independent World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report into systemic doping, money laundering and extortion in athletics.

Co-author Richard McLaren, a highly respected international sports lawyer, has already revealed the report will show “a whole different scale of corruption”, even compared to Fifa’s kleptocratic culture. He predicts it will be “a real game-changer for sport”.

There is a sense of foreboding that the first boulders in a landslide have been released. Football’s bitter experience, and cycling’s continued inability to come to terms with what Lance Armstrong’s application of power represented, suggests athletics’ problems have only just begun.

As president of the IAAF, track and field’s global governing body, Coe will surely have no option but to respond immediately, though his organisation’s ethics commission will not hold its hearing into related charges for another five weeks.

To use the phrase he employed most grievously against measured critics, who highlighted suspicious performance data, nothing less than a declaration of war is required. Coe must ignore cautionary caveats and sugar-coated soundbites. His anger must be vivid, and leavened by long overdue humility.

A lot appears to have happened on his watch, since he was first elected to the IAAF Council in 2003. How can he justify his forcefully expressed faith in his sport’s credibility and authenticity? Did he choose his allies and his causes injudiciously? Did he have suspicions? For what it is worth, as someone who has followed his career, from an initially awkward ingenue to an accomplished if intermittently impulsive politician, over the past 35 years, I doubt neither his integrity nor the depth of his resolve.

He must acknowledge his faults and confirm his intention to shed external consultancy work which encourages perceptions of vested interest. He must remind himself of the human dimension to the problem.

He has a responsibility to the clean athlete, to the child who finds self-expression in running freely and easily, or in jumping long and languidly. He must reassure parents, who form the base of a pyramid which supports the sport, and its shallow, self-possessed champions. He must make better use of fearless associates, such as Michael Johnson and Daley Thompson. He should have no hesitation in trampling over the sensibilities of friend and foe alike, by shedding his self-defensiveness and attacking athletics’ cheerleading culture.

Sport is still shaped by outdated command and control structures from another century. Governing bodies, bloated by excessive national affiliation and attendant political compromise, are designed to reward those, like Diack and Sepp Blatter, who understand the power of their patronage. The plight of football and cycling suggests absolute power corrupts absolutely. Cricket and, to a lesser degree, rugby union are administered with an ominous lack of transparency. Swimming, another major Olympic sport, has been slow to recognise its drug problem.

Coe has the opportunity to reinvent his organisation as a streamlined, inclusive body driven by a small executive rather than a network of committee-room tyrants. His mission statement must incorporate the inconvenient truth that millions no longer trust what they are seeing when they watch athletics.

He must give them a reason to believe before it is too late.

Spurs are on a surge

Whisper it, but a quiet revolution, based upon such unfashionable virtues as stability and strategic planning, promises to shape the outcome of today’s north London derby at the Emirates Stadium.

Tottenham’s reputation as the most febrile of clubs has softened significantly this season, when the consequences of a change in approach have become apparent.

Their recruitment policy is no longer dictated by the highly developed ego of chairman Daniel Levy, or by the political dexterity of the unlamented former technical director Franco Baldini. Paul Mitchell, who worked with Mauricio Pochettino at Southampton, and Rob Mackenzie, Leicester’s former head of technical scouting, have helped to create the template of a young, remorselessly energetic, team.

Spurs have superior central defenders to Arsenal, in Toby Alderweireld and Jan Vertonghen, even if their full-backs are relatively weak. They will harry their hosts, who lack emerging players of the technical quality and strength of character displayed by Eric Dier and Dele Alli.

Pochettino’s faith in young players is compelling, and resistant to the sort of hysteria which led to premature questioning of Harry Kane’s ability to sustain last season’s impact.

Arsenal harbour hopes of winning the title. Tottenham have momentum on their side, and Champions League qualification in their sights. For once, that tired old title, of Super Sunday, could be appropriate.

Terry miscues tackle

Robbie Savage is that modern phenomenon, a dispenser of ghost-written gibberish, instant and interchangeable opinion. He plays so shamelessly to the camera, as an autocue cutie, that he was the perfect target for John Terry.

For all his faults, Chelsea’s captain doesn’t do vacuity. A shame then, that he diluted the impact of his criticism by dredging up the usual drivel about respecting only the opinions of those who have played, with due reward, at the highest level.

To restate the obvious, being a gifted footballer is no guarantee of articulacy or authenticity.

Michael Calvin will discuss Living On The Volcano, his study of football management, which has been shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, at the London Sportswriting Festival at Lord’s on Saturday evening