Sport is once more in the spotlight for entirely the wrong reasons. Allegations have been leveled against the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) that it has failed to act on suspicious blood test results produced by 800 of the 5,000 athletes from whom it took samples between 2001 and 2012. Most startlingly, reporters in Germany and the UK on Sunday asserted that 146 medals, including 55 golds, awarded at the Olympics and World Athletic Championships in those 11 years could have been won by athletes who had taken banned, performance-enhancing drugs. The IAAF has responded angrily to the accusations, criticizing the experts who studied the leaked database. Perhaps unwisely, the IAAF which is the governing body for world athletics, has said that it has looked into the allegations and found them to be false. A mere 24 hours seems insufficient time to draw such a definitive conclusion. The organization's response looks more like a knee-jerk reaction which is not particularly convincing. Instead of agreeing that in principle there was an issue that needed to be looked into more closely, the IAAF has passed the initiative to the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), who have said that they are very alarmed at the data that have been published. What is surely most alarming are not the suspect test records, but the fact that the IAAF appears to have done nothing about them. It took a whistleblower to bring the data into the public domain. The clear concern has to be that for some reason, not yet understood, the organization chose to ignore a problem which had deeply disturbing implications. With 415 dubious tests, Russia dominated the suspect list. Kenyan long-distance runners meanwhile notched up 77 suspicious analyses. Moscow has damned the revelations, saying that they are part of a plot to affect the August elections for a new IAAF president. Even if there is any justice in this claim, two questions have to be asked of the IAAF. The first is exactly why it did not consider the 800 abnormal results, some 72 every 12 months over the eleven years, worthy of further investigation. What has been the science behind this conclusion? In its swift rebuttal of the weekend claims, the IAAF did not provide any explanation. The second question has to be why it did not share its results with the WADA or any of the national athletics organizations at whose head it sits. At the very least the experts at WADA could have signed off on the IAAF's decision to take no substantive action. Tragically for the good name of sport, there is once again a serious issue about the probity and indeed effectiveness of a key governing body. Coming so close on the heels of the payola scandal at football's FIFA and the earlier revelations of bribery and corruption at the International Olympic Committee and the enduring doping issues in international cycling, the accusations against the IAAF are deeply depressing. If there is any truth in the claims, it will mean that honest athletes, who devoted their lives to ruthlessly hard training, were nevertheless robbed of the laurels they deserved by common cheats. A thorough investigation is called for, and it seems clear that the IAAF cannot be trusted to examine itself.
