IAAF doping row: Lord Coe must act over Lamine Diack cover-up claims, or he’s just another Sepp Blatter

Just when it seemed that the integrity of sport could not be more dragged any further into the filth by the suffocating daily chronicles of Fifa graft, athletics takes things down; deeper and deeper. So deep, in fact, that the juxtaposition of those words “integrity” and “sport” are nothing less than a joke.

It was not those familiar Fifa aristocrats being dragged from their beds and their offices by investigators, but Lamine Diack, the Senegalese former head of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), who is under suspicion of taking at least €200,000 (£141,000) from Russia to cover up positive doping tests. It is one thing to trouser backhanders from the World Cup’s commercial gravy train. It is something entirely different to bank cash so that those who seek to cheat are free to do so with impunity.

Some old Fifa routines visited athletics. Gabriel Dolle, former director of the IAAF’s “anti-doping department” (yes, you read it right), went into custody. And, resonant of Blatter’s place, the good ship IAAF – under Sebastian Coe’s leadership since Diack retired in August – sailed merrily on, apparently oblivious to any sense that its sport is more deeply and foully discredited than any other, after a year of relentless doping revelations.

No mention on the IAAF website of its former president being investigated, needless to say. Just the image of a beaming Coe on his recent “first official visit” to Russia – the very country now suspected of bribing his predecessor. The image captures Coe, standing like royalty beneath an image of himself, in what the IAAF calls its “regional development centre” in Moscow.

It is accompanied by tedious guff about Coe meeting and greeting Russian athletics people, appreciating “the openness, passion for our sport, appetite for change… need to build trust and defend clean athletes at all times…” blah, blah, blah. This is the same Coe, let’s remember, who said this summer that The Sunday Times had “declared war on athletics” with its powerful, valuable investigative journalism.

Coe told us he would make things different and wipe away the scourge of drugs and suspicion for all time. Well, we’re still waiting for a sign. Perhaps the indignity of being in the office when the French cops called and volunteering himself for their questioning might trigger a reaction. Events like that don’t reflect well on a president.