Sebastian Coe will continue to resist calls to immediately sever his ties with Nike even though he faces further scrutiny over a potential conflict of interest when senior IAAF members meet in Monaco on Thursday.
When elected as the IAAF president in August, Lord Coe indicated he would resist calls to give up his £100,000 a year ambassadorial role with the US multinational but has since said he will review all his relationships by the end of the year.
That position remains unaltered despite leaked emails showing he discussed his support for Eugene’s successful bid for the 2021 World Athletics Championships with executives from the sportswear company in January of this year.
While Coe knows he will be criticised for such an approach, he maintains his sole focus should be on reforming the International Association of Athletics Federations, which has been beset by scandals involving corruption allegations against its former president Lamine Diack and other senior executivesas well as systemic cheating in Russia. That is the message he will deliver to the 26 members of the IAAF’s council in Monaco.
Coe, who became IAAF president overcoming Sergey Bubka in a close race, will also urge members to back his package of reform measures, including a stronger integrity unit consisting of an independent integrity board and review panels.
As part of a wider governance review, the issue of whether to pay the president is also expected to be raised in Monaco. Coe has appointed the former London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton to oversee the reform programme.
Some council members are keen to introduce the idea of paying the IAAF president properly as part of a package of measures that will include getting rid of the lavish per diems payments, ending the expenses culture and putting in place a proper executive salary. As things stand, Coe is not paid for his role as IAAF president. Yet he will not escape Monaco without facing further questions about his relationship with Nike and what he knew about alleged corruption under his predecessor, Lamine Diack. Coe was a vice-president for seven years under the Senegalese, to whom he paid a series of extraordinary tributes to in August when he called him his “spiritual president”.
Coe has maintained there is no conflict of interest between his Nike role, which is centred on its anti-obesity campaign Designed to Move and was agreed in 2012, and his position as leader of world athletics. Coe, who will also face the world’s media for the first time since the world championships in Beijing, will also be questioned about the governing body’s decision to award the world championships to the Oregon city in April without a vote.
On Tuesday, an email was published by the BBC which showed a senior Nike executive, Craig Masback, discussing a conversation with Coe about the bid. In an email to the Eugene bid leader, Vin Lananna, the former Oregon coach who is the president of TrackTown USA and will coach the US men’s track and field team at the 2016 Rio Olympics, Masback says Coe made his support for Eugene clear but that he believed no decision would be taken until November 2016, after Diack had left his post.
“I spoke with Seb this morning. We covered several topics but I asked specifically about 2021. He made clear his support for 2021 in Eugene but made equally clear that he had reached out to Diack specifically on this topic and got a clear statement from Diack that ‘I am not going to take any action at that April meeting [in Beijing] to choose a 2021 site’,” said the email, sent in January 2015 before Coe won the race to succeed Diack.
“Seb made it clear that if he is elected president that he is willing to consider as early as next November choosing the 2021 site.”
Coe has said he did not lobby for the Eugene bid among his fellow council members and his been open about his support for the bid. He said it was natural he would encourage the town, which is where Nike was founded and is 100 miles from its current home in Portland, to bid again given it narrowly lost out to Doha for the 2019 world championships.
It was Diack who abruptly decided in April of this year to award the 2021 championships to Eugene without a vote, enraging a proposed rival bid from Gothenburg.