Sebastian Coe rarely loses a race. But on 14 January of this year, he found himself chased by a rabble of reporters, trailing him like a conga line as he weaved through the lobby of a Munich hotel. The double Olympic gold medallist, a national hero on the track and the celebrated architect of London’s 2012 Games, could not outrun his pursuers this time – instead, he barricaded himself in a small room with his harassed PR advisers.

The reason for the chase was a dramatic news conference that had just come to an end. Dick Pound, the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), had just announced the damning results of his investigation into corruption at the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). Coe, who had been elected president of the IAAF six months earlier, was not required to attend – but he had decided to be there in person. So Coe sat and fiddled with his glasses in the back of the hall as Pound recounted a lurid history of state-sponsored doping, false drug tests, extortion, and kickbacks. The allegations of corruption went all the way to the top of the organisation that Coe had been involved with for more than a decade.

The media anticipated that Pound’s report would demand Coe’s resignation. But instead the astonished press corps was told that Coe could not have been expected to know how bad things were, and that there was “no one better” to resolve the crisis.

Camera crews jostled outside the room to which Coe had retreated. One of his entourage eventually emerged to try and calm the restive scrum. One reporter called out to ask whether Lord Coe would resign, others demanded how much he had known about corruption in his sport. In a variety of languages, reporters clamoured for an answer to the question that Jon Snow had put to Coe a few months earlier during an uncomfortable interview on Channel 4 News: was the Olympic hero “asleep on the job? Or corrupt?”

It was just the latest in a series of chastening experiences since Coe assumed the presidency of the international governing body for athletics. When he took the post in August 2015, he declared it the biggest achievement of his career. Six months later, he was admitting it was his “chunkiest challenge” – by which he meant his worst nightmare. From the moment of his election, Coe has seemed like a man trying to rescue his reputation in the face of intense and often hostile scrutiny. The descent from national treasure, in the wake of London’s golden Olympic summer, to poster boy for the glib complacency of global sport’s elite, had been dizzyingly swift.

When Coe ran for president of the IAAF, he proclaimed his determination to restore the sport’s reputation: “There is no task I have been better prepared for. There is no job I have ever wanted to do more and to do with greater commitment.” But on the day Coe moved into the IAAF president’s office in Monaco, he had barely sat down before the French police arrived. The revelation of Russian athletes and coaches doping on a massive scale was first aired by German TV in 2014. It sparked a wide-ranging investigation by Wada – an organisation jointly funded by the International Olympic Committee and various national governments – which led right to the door of Coe’s predecessor as president, Lamine Diack.

Even before he retired as a middle-distance runner in early 1990, at the age of 34, Coe had set about inserting himself into the secretive, arcane world of global sporting governance.

A crucial part of Coe’s appeal to his international, blazer-clad colleagues was that, at a time when many in that world viewed the British as arrogant old colonialists, he presented himself as one of them. “One of the things [they] quite like is that I don’t sit there viewing the world through the wrong end of a telescope from Ruislip,” he later said. “I genuinely don’t have a particularly British view. The one reason I have prospered in the IAAF is that people don’t see me as holding stereotypical British views about life.”

Coe plunged into politics with limited success – he was elected Tory MP for Falmouth in 1992 before losing his seat five years later in the New Labour landslide. A frequently mocked period as William Hague’s chief of staff followed, having accepted a life peerage in 2000. He returned to the world of sport first as leader of the London 2012 bid, then as head of the organising committee.

Coe appeared to feel at home in the arid, hermetic world of sporting diplomacy. He was one of the first athletes to slip with ease into the interlocking organisations – many of them based in Switzerland – that gained increasing power as sport’s cultural capital and money-making potential expanded in the global broadcasting age. While his political and business careers never reached the heights of his storied time on the track, it was there that he found his metier.

In 2006, in the wake of allegations that referees had been bribed, football’s now disgraced and discredited governing body Fifa set up an ethics committee, with Coe as chair. The following year, he was elected vice-president of the IAAF, and re-elected in 2011.

The architecture of sporting bureaucracy seems key to the corruption that has since come to light. The bidding process for major sporting events, and the negotiations over the attendant marketing and broadcasting deals, offer ample potential for bribery and kickbacks.

Within the structure of the Olympic Games, beneath the IOC’s 105 members sit the international sporting federations – of which the IAAF is the most prominent – and national Olympic committees that jealously guard their independence from their own governments. With little oversight and arcane governance better suited to the amateur era, the laboratory conditions for pervasive corruption were in place.

Sebastian Coe in London the day after the World Anti-Doping Agency recommended the suspension of Russian athletes from competition. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

At 59, Coe has retained his lean athlete’s frame and glossy mane. He is still recognisably the same man that inspired admiration in some and a curious antagonism in others as an Olympic medallist. He is also engaging company, his eyes brightest when talking about football or athletics. Yet there can be an arrogance about him – one that is common in many former athletes who reached the very top – a conviction that he knows best.

When we met in March, Coe habitually ran his fingers through his hair as he wrestled with the fact his sport is on its knees and, that – far from being seen as its saviour, as he had hoped – his own behaviour has come under severe scrutiny. He was frustrated at “the idea I’d sort of blundered into this as the president of the IAAF and wasn’t going through a really serious process”.

Two months after Coe paid fulsome tribute to his predecessor Lamine Diack, Diack was placed under investigation

We were in London, at the Buckingham Gate offices of the marketing agency CSM, where Coe became executive chairman following the purchase of his own consultancy firm, CLG – which provided strategic advice to sports brands – for a reported £12m in 2012. Coe has become so used to slipping seamlessly between his business, administrative and sporting interests that he semms to sometimes forget which role he is currently playing. His longstanding relationship with Nike – and with the clients of CLG and CSM – has led to inevitable accusations of conflicts of interest, which have not helped Coe’s efforts to be seen as the man cleaning up athletics. In his first months on the job, he struggled mightily to contain a crisis in his sport that seemed to be spinning beyond his control. He was visibly ruffled as questions over how much he personally knew grew ever louder. In November 2015, a few days after police raided the IAAF offices, the first of two independent reports by Wada’s respected founding president, Dick Pound, found a “deeply rooted culture of cheating” in Russian sport and “corruption and bribery practices at the highest levels of international athletics”. It went on to recommend that Russian athletes be suspended from the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

Just two months after Coe had paid fulsome tribute to his IAAF predecessor – “he will always be our spiritual president and he will certainly be my spiritual president” – Diack was placed under formal investigation on charges of “passive corruption” and alleged to have taken around €1m from the Russian federation to cover up positive tests. On 14 January 2016, the second part of Pound’s report – which sent reporters chasing Coe through that Munich hotel – announced that the Russian cheating had been enabled by a corrupt cabal surrounding Diack, who had run the IAAF as his own personal kleptocracy, through a combination of fear and favours, for 16 years.

The ongoing fallout from the twin scandals – Russian doping and IAAF corruption – has brought Coe to the most difficult moment of his career. Tomorrow, 17 June, he will chair a meeting of the IAAF Council in Vienna that will make the decision on whether to maintain the exclusion of all Russian track and field athletes from this summer’s Olympic Games.

Athletes outside Russia have demanded tough action, citing their loss of faith in the institutions supposed to ensure clean competition. Athletes within Russia have argued that it is not fair to penalise them for the sins of others and have even hinted at legal action.

Coe knows that if he takes a tough line against Russia, with a single bound he will be free of the heavy fire he has come under at home. But he is equally aware that it would make him hugely unpopular among the “Olympic family”, whose respect he continues to crave. The fear is that a compromise will be made that will satisfy neither side.

Coe’s current predicament is symptomatic of the problem with modern sport. For those of a certain vintage, he is remembered as a winner on the track and a reminder of the times when British middle-distance running – in particular, his dramatic battles with Steve Ovett and, later, Steve Cram – would fill as many column inches as top-flight football. For many more, his triumphant stewardship of the London 2012 Olympic Games remains fresh in the memory (“When our time came, we did it right,” he told the crowd at the closing ceremony).

But in some ways, his position is impossible. It was Coe’s ability to negotiate the twisted dynamics of the “Olympic family” that enabled London to win the right to host the 2012 Games in the first place. Now he is being criticised for being too much a part of it.

Coe greets fellow Olympic gold medallist Sergey Bubka, with his then boss Lamine Diack sitting in front, at an IAAF meeting in Monaco in 2009. Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP

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There was little doubt that Coe nurtured his relationship with Lamine Diack throughout his years as vice-president: these sporting bodies work on patronage, and Coe knew that Diack’s vote would be key to getting the top job. Not only that, but Diack had been crucial to delivering the vote that secured national glory for Coe – the 2005 decision to award the Olympics to London. Now that Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic bid has come under scrutiny over a suspect $2m payment to a secret Singapore bank account linked to Diack’s son, Papa Massata Diack, Coe insists there was nothing untoward about London’s bid.

“I know what we did to get across the line. We were smart, we used embassies as a good campaign does,” he told me. “But there’s nothing there we would be embarrassed about in future years.” When he found out about Lamine Diack’s involvement in the doping cover-ups after taking office as IAAF president, Coe is said by his associates to have turned white with shock. Perhaps it should not have come as quite such a surprise. As Eliane Houlette, the French prosecutor who has led the investigation into IAAF corruption, observed while announcing the charges against Diack and his son, international sports federations “have become totally gangrenous with all this money”.

Coe insists that while he was obviously aware of gossip about the depths of the Russian doping crisis during his period as vice-president, he had no inkling of the extent of the corruption inside the IAAF. Likewise, while Papa Massata Diack’s activities as IAAF’s marketing consultant were a constant source of gossip in IAAF circles, Coe continues to insist that he saw no evidence of corruption.

His position is that for much of the period in question, he was bidding for and then organising an Olympic Games in London – although that only takes him to 2013, when the London Olympics committee, Locog, disbanded. He attended every IAAF council meeting during that period but says that none of those around the table had any inkling what Diack and his cronies were up to in the “alternative governance structure” later identified by Pound.

Coe insisted he was keen to clean house. When we met in early March, he told me he had written to the UK Treasury and authorities in Singapore to encourage them to cooperate with the ongoing inquiry into illegal payments to Diack and his son. Having initially refused to sign his witness statement because there was no lawyer present, according to sources close to the investigation, Coe is now believed to be in regular contact with Houlette.

Many outside the sport still wonder whether he is too compromised to be capable of cleaning up the mess

One of Coe’s first actions after his election was to hire a longstanding IAAF executive, Nick Davies – a British ally who had helped Coe in his campaign – as chief of staff. It is a decision that calls his judgment into question. Davies was last week, on June 10, provisionally suspended while the ethics committee investigated an email that appeared to show he was offered $30,000 by Papa Massata Diack, in return for help in managing the impact of news about positive Russian drug tests. Davies’s wife, Jane Boulter, who also worked at the IAAF, was suspended over the affair too. Davies denied the allegations when he stepped down.

“Let’s bring this horror show to as quick a conclusion as we possibly can,” Coe told me in March. “If these guys want to get into whatever this Singapore business is [the secret account through which Papa Massata Diack is alleged to have funnelled bribes], then let them. What else is out there? I don’t know.”

In Coe’s defence, it was he who drove through the belated creation of the IAAF’s independent ethics commission in 2014, which catalogued the wrongdoing. Yet many outside the sport still wonder whether he is too compromised to be capable of cleaning up the mess. He certainly appeared to take too long to acknowledge just how bad it was.

Asked what he would have done differently, he said: “It’s a question people have rightly asked and it’s one I’ve sat in my quieter moments thinking about. If you look at the immediate issues, it’s difficult to see how, once the ethics commission was up and running and Pound’s commission was up and running, during that period we could have inserted ourselves into a process that was already under way.”

Coe appeared to accept that, in hindsight, more questions should have been asked earlier about what exactly Papa Massata Diack was up to in his role as a marketing consultant (he has denied any wrongdoing). Certainly, someone should have questioned Lamine Diack, who had been censured by the IOC in 2011 after appearing on a list obtained by investigative journalist Andrew Jennings of sports grandees who had received a total of $100m in bribes from a sports marketing firm. Diack claimed it was a gift after his house burned down, without insurance.

Even as doping allegations swirled around the world championships in Beijing last year, all present in the Bird’s Nest stadium were required to stand for the IAAF hymn. Diack’s acolytes continued to buzz around him in the Chinese capital. In the hospitality areas and hotel lobbies there was more chatter about who was going to get coveted committee positions than how to save the sport from cheating and corruption.

Sports politics is insular, exclusive, self-governing. “It’s not a world I’m sitting here condemning because I’ve seen that, at it’s best, it’s done some extraordinary things. And yes, of course it’s collegiate and sometimes it’s less than challenging,” said Coe. “But I have for a long time worried about the inter-connectivity between the same people in the same organisations.” Yet, ultimately, it protects itself. At the Cardiff world half marathon championships in March, in teeming rain, where Mo Farah finished third, behind the Kenyans Geoffrey Kamworor and Bedan Karoki, Coe wondered aloud whether things are really as bad as all that.

“Do you think we’re not slightly ‘inside the beltway’ here when we say there’s a huge cynicism? I think there’s an element of [people saying] a plague on all their houses and a slight sense they think we’re all a bit self-serving, but I don’t think it’s that different from the way in which they view bankers or politicians or the media,” said Coe, still bubbling with enthusiasm at the race he had just witnessed, as a stream of well-wishers in cagoules came forward to ask for selfies.

But that damp day in Cardiff illustrated another truth about the hole athletics finds itself in. Despite the popularity of a mass-participation half-marathon that runs alongside the elite race, few of those training for it (or part of the parkrun phenomenon, or running the London Marathon or the Great North Run for charity) consider themselves part of his sport. The number of people taking up running is booming, in inverse proportion to those watching athletics.

“Doping is not our biggest problem. It’s a massive problem but the biggest challenge is inspiring people to take up our sport,” he admitted. “Where are the new generation?” Coe has plans to revitalise the sport – expanding the calendar, bringing in more sponsors, engaging with a younger audience and coming up with new formats. He is endlessly frustrated at the lack of profile for track and field. Since his glory days in the 1980s, it has become ever less relevant in Britain, except when the Olympics rolls around. But, for now, the doping issues continue to obscure all else.

Last summer’s World Athletics Championships was tainted by an undercurrent of cynicism that has dragged athletics the way of professional cycling in the Lance Armstrong era. Every amazing performance was immediately questioned. In the wake of the doping revelations out of Russia and elsewhere, a shadow hangs over the Rio Olympics.

Coe did seem to recognise the need to extricate himself from the web of faux chumminess and nepotism

Coe was clear that the IAAF’s rule book would be overhauled, introducing the separation between its oversight board and the executive that had long been lacking, and introducing the sort of corporate governance regulations that have long been standard in business.

“It’s non-negotiable. I want our organisation in two years’ time to be seen as a leader. And it will,” he said. “It’ll be better than anything the IOC has got on the books. It will be better than anything Fifa will agree to in principle. This stuff will be through in December of this year.”

Coe did seem to recognise the need to extricate himself from the web of faux chumminess and nepotism that has made the organisations that run world sport impervious to external challenge. Yet to do so meant denying part of his own personality. He repeatedly insisted that he never considered quitting his (unpaid) IAAF role, though he revealed he would only serve one four-year term, and that this will be his last major job in sport – ruling out a long rumoured bid for the biggest job of all, the IOC presidency. Last month, it emerged that he had not even put his name forward to be an IOC member.

“This is absolutely the last thing I do in sport,” he told me when we spoke in Lausanne in March. “There is no other ambition to do anything else. I’m nearly 60. I do not want to be doing this into my 70s,” he said. “I probably don’t want to be doing this for a good chunk of my 60s either. I want to get this into the right kind of shape by the time I’ve finished my four years.”

Back at CSM in London – where he is still executive chairman, despite insisting that the IAAF crisis is taking up most of his time – Coe has no computer on his desk (and an aversion to technology that used to extend to getting his kids to send text messages for him) but the walls were lined with paraphernalia that spoke to his view of himself. Alongside a signed Chelsea shirt (a lifelong fan, he retained season tickets in the Shed) sat pictures of him embracing IOC president Thomas Bach (a longtime friend and ally, who also happens to be very keen on Russians competing in Rio), his children and his hugely influential late father and former coach Peter Coe. Even as he attempted to explain how he is able to maintain Chinese walls between his various interests – including CSM’s long list of clients – it was hard to keep up with his explanation of how he kept the plates spinning.

“I’m pretty good at triaging. I’ve always done that. I’ve always worked in pretty complex environments. If I have one quality, I can focus and I don’t allow time to just dribble away. I do start early. I’m up at 5am pretty much every day,” he said, before running through the “root and branch review” of the IAAF he had drawn up that very morning.

At the end of November 2015, Coe held a downbeat press conference in Monaco, in the gloomy basement of the Fairmont hotel. The IAAF had been based in the principality since 1994, at the invitation of Prince Rainer III, and ghosts of the recent past haunted the hotel, where Diack had kept a grace-and-favour apartment, and where his son allegedly handed over bundles of cash to the former head of its anti-doping unit in a bid to delay publication of positive drug tests.

Coe veered between defiance and defensiveness as he reluctantly announced he was giving up an ambassadorial role with the US sportswear giant Nike that paid £100,000 a year.

From the day he had won the IAAF presidential election, Coe had appeared baffled by the focus on his Nike links and the negative press coming his way. Amid an atmosphere of paranoia, Coe, normally smooth and charming, appeared frazzled, and irritably dismissed journalists who approached him in the hotel as he was making his retreat. He could not see that there was a conflict of interest between his longstanding links with Nike, then also mired in controversy over its backing of the twice-banned sprinter Justin Gatlin, and his position at the head of the sport. This attitude was used by his detractors as evidence that he was completely out of touch.

But what Coe considered a side issue, the question of his loyalty to Nike – the upstart that challenged the hegemony of Adidas in the 1970s to become one of the world’s biggest and most controversial brands – was actually key to the disillusionment that the public felt in its sporting leaders. Those two brands played a major role in commercialising sport, and both helped fuel the rise in sponsorship money that enriched and empowered the mandarins at Fifa and the IOC.

Coe faces the media in Monaco after stepping down as a Nike ambassador. Photograph: Dan Mullan/Getty Images

It was Horst Dassler, the son of founder Adi, who minted the model of kickbacks and influence peddling that ran out of control in the 1980s and 1990s – leading indirectly to the wave of dawn raids and arrests at Fifa HQ in Zurich and the IAAF’s offices in Monaco last year. The late Dassler levered his preferred candidates into positions of sporting influence and then reaped the benefits. It was Dassler who helped groom Blatter in his role at Fifa, and it was Dassler’s creation ISL who paid at least $100m in kickbacks to Fifa and other sporting executives (including Lamine Diack) in the late 1990s.

Coe’s unfortunate comment last August that doping allegations made by the Sunday Times newspaper amounted to a “declaration of war” on the sport of athletics did not help matters. He now accepts the remark, which has dogged him ever since, was “clumsy” and insisted it was not meant to be interpreted as an attack on the media as a whole, but on that newspaper’s investigation into how the IAAF handled blood doping cases in particular.

Since then, a sharp divide has opened up between the athletics fraternity – many of whom have known Coe personally for a long time and continue to insist that he is the best man for the job – and others who believe he is compromised by his history in the sport.

Even some of those in British sport who would consider themselves longstanding allies have started to privately question his judgment. Others have been more open. Martyn Rooney, the sprinter who is captain of the British athletics team said in November that it was “pretty disrespectful to believe the vice-president did not know what was going on within the IAAF”. “That is his job and if he believes he did not know what was going on, he has not been doing his job properly,” Rooney said.

Rooney spoke for many when he said: “I want to believe he is the right person for the job. I feel he is strong and smart enough to be that person, it is just whether it is the best thing for athletics to have someone who was involved in the IAAF at that period still involved at the turnaround.”

Coe is convinced that things were simpler in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was competing, and yet, owing to a comparative lack of testing and rampant state-sponsored doping across many nations, that the problem was immeasurably worse then. It was, he said, a “free-for-all”.

“It was never a world I was in. I never had a coach or a physiologist or anatomists or biomechanics guys that were trying to figure out where the line was. I didn’t take supplements. I am an asthmatic and I had the old Ventolin spray that I occasionally took when I was struggling,” said Coe, who was accused, without any evidence, of doping. “My old man was absolutely paranoid about it. He would sit down with the doctor and make sure they had it registered. I sort of did what I did on food,” he said.

Coe is at his most cogent when he brings things back to the nuts and bolts of his sport. He concludes: “Coaching is an art and a science. I think the risk is that we’ve now got a very good generation of sport scientists and not such a good generation of coaches.”

But when the talk returns to the challenges he is facing at the IAAF, his language becomes opaque and imprecise, as though he is convinced that simply being Seb Coe will be enough to get him through. That streak of confidence that can tip into an arrogance – essential to a runner, dangerous as a sporting administrator in the current febrile climate – could yet be prove his downfall.

As revelations about the depths of institutional doping in Russia continue to tumble out, he is trapped: between the power of Vladimir Putin and the wishes of Bach on the one hand and the clear feeling elsewhere that to allow Russian athletes to compete in Rio would be the worst possible signal to send to the cheats on the other. Even Wada, the anti-doping watchdog, appears to be split between the hawks who believe Russia should be punished even if clean athletes get caught in the crossfire, and those who believe that banning an entire nation is excessive.

“I like the fact people get angry about it. That they care and are passionate about it and ask those questions. I think back to the 1992 general election and going on to the doorsteps. It was like Armageddon out there, you were engaged with really aggressive people all the time. In the end, I recognised that the fact they were aggressive and angry meant they were still engaged,” says Coe.

“It can be tough but we should be grateful that they still hold us to a higher standard. It would be worse if people said ‘Let it go, who cares, it’s worse than American wrestling’. Worse than the fact they think it’s fake is that they don’t care.”

An IAAF inspection team, led by the Norwegian Rune Andersen, has been charged with ensuring that the Russian testing system is robust. It has already once delayed its decision on whether Russia should be allowed to compete.

“It’s a big, big decision. We all know it’s a big decision. My instinct is that whatever happens, the world goes on. We know that’s a big decision,” says Coe. “But whichever way that goes, is that going to cast a massive shadow over Rio? No, I don’t think so. But whatever decision is made, there are ramifications.”

You can’t help but feel that Coe, who says he will defer to the decision of Andersen’s team, knows that banning Russia is the right thing to do in moral terms, but that he is compromised by the politics.

When I spoke to him in the last week of May, he was pounding out miles on his treadmill at his home in Surrey as we talked on the phone. In the time since our earlier interviews, there had been more bad news, including a batch of retests by the IOC that led to dozens of athletes being retrospectively stripped of their results from the Beijing and London Olympics.

Suspicious payments from the Tokyo 2020 Olympic bid team to an account linked to Diack’s son and Bach’s manoeuvring to get the Russians back in have increased already high levels of scepticism as to whether sport is capable of solving its own deep-seated issues. And the sense that there are more crises to come – for athletics, for the wider Olympic movement and perhaps for Coe personally – is inescapable. But in contrast to the rather diminished figure he presented in Munich at the turn of the year, Coe insisted he was fighting back on behalf of his sport and that his race was not yet run.

“As a former government whip I would never instinctively describe anything as always under control. Was it Macmillan who when he was asked what he was most worried about said ‘Events, dear boy, events’?

“What I can say is that the organisation is stronger than it’s been for a long time and we will deal with whatever comes down the line. That’s the only honest answer I can give.”

At the moment, it’s the only one he’s got.

Main photograph: Christopher Thomond

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