Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow asked the IAAF president: “You were either asleep on the job or corrupt. Which is it?”
Lord Coe, president of world athletics governing body, is facing growing calls to explain exactly how much he knew about doping and corruption within the organisation and the sport in the last decade.
Channel 4 News
An independent commission set up by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) found that Russian middle-distance runners had used drugs to enhance their chances of winning.
The commission's report said that both the Russian anti-doping agency and the IAAF were guilty of a "laissez-faire" attitude towards doping.
Coe took over from longstanding IAAF president Lamine Diack in August and praised the Senegalese 82-year-old for his "shrewd stewardship" and said he'd remain the organisation's "spiritual president".
These remarks have come back to haunt Coe after Diack was arrested by French prosecutors alongside two others last week, amid allegations of a cover-up.
Coe served as Diack's vice-president from 2007 to this year, raising questions of exactly how much he knew about the organisation's alleged involvement in doping.
In a testy interview with Channel 4 News on Monday night, Coe faced a barrage of questions about his conduct and knowledge of any wrongdoing but maintained that his focus was on sorting out the problem.
"My responsibility now is to create a sport that is transparent, accountable, and responsible. If there are failings in our anti-doping processes then we will fix them," he said.
"If there are corporate governances that should have been in place, particularly given the severity of the criminal allegations that were made at the beginning of the week, then yes, we all need to look at ourselves."
Coe said that the WADA commission found that "rogue elements may well have infiltrated the organisation" and this meant there may "not necessarily be a wholesale systemic failure of our systems".
In August Coe described allegations of suspicious test results from some athletes as "a war on my sport".
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