If Lamine Diack is found guilty of doping corruption claims, he’ll zoom to the top of sport’s murkiest miscreants

Lamine Diack, the former head of the IAAF, is being investigated for corruption and aggravated money laundering

Lamine Diack, the former head of the IAAF, is being investigated for corruption and aggravated money laundering (Getty)

Sometimes an accusation is so outrageous it transcends outrage. It is so breathtaking it leaves the impulse to anger flailing in its wake, and all you can do is stand and applaud.

A Catholic plotter by the name of Guido Fawkes tried a pretty outrageous crime once. He didn’t quite manage it. And his was a simple plot compared with what, 410 years later, would be required to sort out sports politics. From Zurich to Nyon to Monaco, there are just too many houses to blow up.

Not that anyone cares, in this case. It’s only athletics under the microscope, it’s not an Olympic year, it doesn’t at first glance appear to have anything to do with Jose Mourinho and so far there’s no sex tape involved. But none of that means the charge levelled at Lamine Diack – should it be proved true – is anything other than the single greatest outrage in the history of sport.

Corruption, certainly, is an insufficient term to describe the charge. That word implies decay, a fall from grace, a succumbing to temptation, a descent from nobler nature to the febrile world of self-interest. This isn’t that. It is a malevolence whose proportions are total. As big as the sport itself.

The charge, should it need repeating, is that Lamine Diack, the Senegalese former chief of world athletics, the very top man, pocketed £140,000 to cover up Russian doping results. That, taking inspiration from Lance Armstrong, he set up a comprehensive doping system, then charged for indemnity from it.

What makes it worse is that the alleged sums are so small – at least at the moment. A hundred and forty grand is small price to fetch for the whole integrity of the Olympics’ blue riband sport. We almost have to hope there is more to come. More deals to be uncovered, a higher price reached somewhere.

“When somebody is in charge of the sport and is protecting and profiteering from cheating, then I don’t think it could be any lower,” was the assessment of Daley Thompson, on TalkSport Radio. “You might think I’m going over the top, but nothing could be worse than this.”

Sepp Blatter and Co, meanwhile, can get back to polishing their haloes. Whatever they’ve done, the odd million Swiss francs gone unaccounted for, at no point has it ever been suggested they have corrupted the actual sporting contest for their own ends. They wouldn’t dare.

Sure, there will always be cheats, always be those whose eyes turn to dollar signs in the glare of the headlights – just ask cricket’s long roll call of match-fixers about that.

But if the man at the very top – even if it is a man about whom the whiff of corruption has for long decades lingered with more pungence than a Glastonbury toilet – really has been getting rich on the back of the certain knowledge that the integrity of the contest is lost, that is a crime in a league of its own. He has been placed under investigation by French police although, of course, nothing has yet been proven.

The stakes, too, could scarcely be higher. It took Coke and McDonald’s long enough to intervene in the Fall of the House of Blatter. For two decades of constant rolling scandal they calculated, quite rightly, that it wasn’t doing them any harm. These are the same companies that bankroll the Olympics. It’s well under a year to Rio 2016, and already far too late for anyone to believe a second of it, when a tumbling world record instantly summons feelings of betrayal and suspicion. The wonder is gone.

Fawkes, it is often glibly said, was the “last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions”. That’s not fair. Proper politics is still a noble pursuit. But as the police storm the barricades of another great rotten sporting citadel, see if another tax-free temple needs cleansing, this time the IAAF headquarters, in Monaco naturally, the world of sports politics must wonder how on earth, short of the sort of steps Mr Fawkes was prepared to take, it can restore itself.

The problem is that the image projected is that there is barely an honest man among them. There can be no more certain way to appear to lack any kind of moral virtue than to work in the world of sports administration.

Now it will fall to Seb Coe, the IAAF’s new president, to make some attempt to clean away this staggering mess, to take a Hoover to Hiroshima. It cannot be done. It will fall to Coe, he who called the journalistic investigation into his sport “a declaration of war”, to lead the way to a better future.

Daley Thompson says he wants prison sentences. Quite right, too. But doing time never restores a person’s reputation, never regains trust. Not when the crime is this bad. Then the damage can never be undone.

There’s an old line put about by crime writers. What’s the biggest heist in criminal history? You don’t know because they didn’t get caught. Well, whatever misdeeds are still lurking beneath sport’s murky surface, and there are many, good luck topping this one.