Like the crooks he’ll leave behind, Lord Coe should run for his life

Coe will need years to have even the slightest chance of steering the IAAF through the nightmare

(GETTY)

Wholly insincere apologies to anyone who has heard it before (if you’ve come here looking for originality, that is your problem). In more carefree times, before the future of world athletics came to rest on his eternally boyish shoulders, Chelsea fan Sebastian Coe went to watch his team at Liverpool. “Not in here,” growled the chap at the Anfield turnstile, when Coe slid his ticket under the grille. “Sorry?” “Not in here with that ticket, pal. You’re all the way round on the opposite side of the ground.” “But I’m Seb Coe,” he protested. “Well, in that case,” muttered the Scouser, “it won’t take you very f****** long, will it?”

Such a high-visibility sporting demigod has Coe been for so long that this urban myth has featured different arenas across the globe, from Lord’s and Wimbledon to Flushing Meadow and the Adelaide Oval. But today the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations may safely be located in just the one venue: Coe is in a living hell – and, if he has any sense, escaping from that won’t take him too long either.

If he chooses to remain, “a marathon, not a sprint” seems the cliché of choice for the challenge facing the middle-distance running legend. Coe will need many years to have even the slightest chance of steering the organisation through the ghoulish nightmare visited it by Mother Russia and others yet to come. And to think that a couple of weeks ago the slump in Chelsea’s form might have been his idea of a grave sporting crisis.

In the intervening days, Coe found the time to contribute the most sparkling newcomer to the Compendium of Hilariously Hubristic Quotations since 2008, when John McCain ended his presidential chances by describing the tanking American economy as “strong”. On returning from last week’s trip to Moscow, where he met Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko and spoke to the All-Russia Athletic Federation, Coe jauntily praised the latter’s “openness”.

Its transparency, he has since learned, wasn’t tip-top after all. He is now informed that the Russians didn’t merely shut their eyes to the usual chemical shortcuts taken by renegade athletes and coaches. Wilful blindness wasn’t the half, quarter or eighth of it. The Russians, a World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) report reveals, ran a state-sponsored programme to destroy evidence of doping and compel athletes to take banned substances at a secret Moscow laboratory. An interviewee told Wada that anyone who complained about this might expect to “accidentally get in a car accident”. While probably a more elegant end than falling down a lift shaft or finding a recherché radioactive isotype in your afternoon tea, being mangled by a Zil for passing on the stanozolol falls tantalisingly short of the Olympic dream.

As for the sports minister with whom Coe had such productive talks, Wada doubts Mutko’s blissful ignorance about state-enforced doping on such an epic scale. Come to that, how could Coe have passed seven years as IAAF vice president without becoming better acquainted with the rumours that swirl incessantly around the sport than his Captain Renault projection of being shocked (shocked!) would suggest?

Is anyone shocked? For almost half a century, has anyone with eyes to see female athletes’ dramatically thickened jaws, and ears to hear them make Paul Robeson sound like a counter-tenor, been in doubt? Did anyone mistake the USA’s recent selection of twice-banned Tyson Gay for a genuine desire to eradicate doping? Or confuse the Jamaicans with rigorous testers? Or imagine that startling improvements late in an athlete’s career happened without assistance?

Those who love the Olympics collude passively in the deception. At the same time as you blub in harmony with the athlete on the podium, you assume he or she might have had help from a syringe. I am entranced by the beauty of the sport; and I know that it’s endemically bent. The trick is to hold the two sensibilities simultanteously. Without this power of double-think, who would bother with athletics at all?

Coe will receive torrents of advice about how to resolve this crisis, almost of all it glib and pointless. Though his integrity is in tact, his authority is ruined by long involvement with the IAAF and his lavish praise of Liam Diack, the predecessor arrested in France last week.

Banning Russia from next summer’s Games in Rio is a populist move that would treat symptom rather than underlying cause: surgically removing a tumour does not improve an outcome when the malignancy has spread to almost every organ. And as if this conundrum weren’t juicy enough, who wants to antagonise Vladimir Putin with Russian fighter jets over Syria?

For the weakened leader of a degraded IAAF, facing corruption on a scale unseen before but inevitably stretching far beyond Russia, this is a problem with no hint of a solution. After his stellar career, on the track and as London’s Olympian god, the kindest advice is adapted from that turnstile curmudgeon of Anfield: run, Seb, run. Run as fast as you can. Leave this monstrous, insoluble mess to somebody else, and run for your life.