Seb Coe is a fine man… but his roasting over the Russian athletics scandal is justified

So Smiley was right all along: the bloody Russians were the baddest of the bad. The Pound report on the epic scale of their state-sponsored doping and cheating in athletics was indeed seismic. It can’t have come as that much of a surprise, though. In a remarkable investigation in July 2013, Martha Kelner and Nick Harris of the Mail on Sunday blew the lid on the whole cesspool of Russian corruption.

This was the headline: Drugs, -bribery and the cover-up! -Russian athletes— including those who robbed Brits of medals — ‘ordered to dope by coaches’ and officials ‘demanded cash to mask positive tests’. Pretty much what we got this week from Dick Pound, the gunslinging sheriff brought in to clean up the sport. But what a pity that athletics’ governing body, the IAAF, hadn’t felt like doing anything a bit earlier.

Its main job has been to say: ‘Move along please, there’s no story here.’ After the Sunday Times revealed that suspicious blood samples had been taken from athletes, Sebastian Coe, then campaigning to become head of the IAAF, said it was ‘a declaration of war on my sport’. Killing the messenger the best policy, eh? I don’t think so. Coe, a fine man of immense achievement, has now come in for a pretty justified roasting. He must be looking back nostalgically to the days when his toughest assignment was to be William Hague’s judo partner. His IAAF predecessor Lamine Diack is now under investigation by French police after accusations of corruption over doping tests. Coe has described Diack as the ‘spiritual leader’ of -athletics. Some spirit, some leader. Coe needs to use his (record-breaking) levels of determination and discipline to get this straightened out.

Russia should be kicked out of Rio, if not banned from all competition until it gets its house in order.