After months campaigning, Sebastian Coe and Sergei Bubka face an election on Wednesday knowing that the new IAAF president will need to go straight to work to convince the public that track and field’s governing body can properly tackle the scourge of doping.
The election in Beijing in the days leading up to the world championships has been set against a backdrop of intense criticism of the IAAF following media reports that it has failed to act on evidence of widespread blood doping.
Coe has long campaigned for increasing the resources “in the battle for our sport’s integrity,” saying an external, fully independent anti-doping tribunal is a must.
Coe also has promised to give the newly created IAAF Ethics Commission all the tools necessary to make it the leading Olympic federation “in terms of integrity.”
Bubka believes the anti-doping system is too complex and “needs to be simplified to become faster and efficient.”
The IAAF Ethics Commission will meet in Beijing with the biggest item on its agenda being the fallout from the allegations from German broadcaster ARD and Britain’s The Sunday Times, which citied leaked test results from an IAAF database and asserted that blood doping was rampant in the sport.
The IAAF last week denied it had tried to block publication of the study, and confirmed that 28 athletes had been caught in retests of their doping samples from the 2005 and 2007 world championships.
The election to decide who will be IAAF president will be held by electronic ballot among the 214 member federations.