Sebastian Coe, the newly installed head of world athletics, has declared his total confidence in Paula Radcliffe and criticised the parliamentary select committee that forced her to defend herself against insinuations of doping.
“I don’t think she should have been put in that position, I really don’t. When we started down this road a few weeks ago I was very clear that no athlete should feel under pressure to release stuff that is private to them,” said Lord Coe, who was voted International Association of Athletics Federations president earlier this month against a the backdrop of a storm over doping allegations.
“I don’t think she should have been treated the way she was. We’ve got to be very careful we don’t end up on a McCarthyesque witch hunt against athletes that are doing their very best and are doing it in a clean way.” Asked directly whether he believed Radcliffe had ever cheated, Coe replied: “I absolutely believe Paula Radcliffe is clean.”
Coe, who said he would appear before the culture, media and sport select committee if called, accepted that steps needed to be taken to restore trust in the testing system but again criticised the way the story had evolved. “Clearly there is a balance. But I do think an individual athlete has the right not to put into the public domain stuff that is personal to them. The risk is that we end up with a series of allegations that have not been substantiated, based on one or two readings,” he said.
“I’ve always been very clear that you can’t extrapolate in that way. That’s been my biggest bugbear. I’ve never criticised the right of any media group to kick the tyres. They should be challenging me, they should be challenging federations. But it is the way that this has been done that has been very damaging to the athletes.”
Coe rejected the suggestion that greater transparency around the blood values of individual athletes was required to restore trust. “This is a very complicated issue. We were the pioneering federation around blood passports. Is that the sort of information a select committee should be making judgments about? I think not,” he said. “The reason you don’t condemn an athlete on one reading is very clear – these are longitudinal studies. The clue is in the word longitudinal.”
The experts used by the Sunday Times have been careful not to name any individual athlete and have previously rejected claims that they were basing their conclusions on incomplete information. Appearing before the select committee on Tuesday, Dr Michael Ashenden said he believed the IAAF was “overwhelmed” by the scale of the problem in the middle of the last decade and had been struggling to catch up ever since.
The governing body has -registered its “considerable dismay” to the committee after it implicated Radcliffe in doping -allegations.
Radcliffe has stepped up her campaign to prove the supposedly suspicious blood values referred to by the -Sunday Times were not evidence of doping and as Sky News revealed the “off scores” in question were 114.86, 109.86 and 109.3.
While any score above 103 at sea level can be the trigger for further investigation and target testing, all three values were recorded after periods of altitude training and had been cleared by experts due to the context in which they were taken.
A 2003 paper to which Dr Michael Ashenden and Robin Parisotto, the experts used by the Sunday Times, contributed also said the commonly used cut-off value for women training at altitude was 111.7. That figure is higher than two of the three scores in question and -Radcliffe has said the third was taken within two hours of competition, which would render it invalid under the rules.
“This data needed to be looked at in context by the right experts so I requested Wada go back and go over again all of this data,” she told Sky News. “I know that the IAAF have done that, I have requested that independent experts do that and I have those reports.”
The IAAF, on the back foot since the Sunday Times published claims that a third of all endurance medallists over a 11-year period had suspicious blood values, has meanwhile written to the culture, media and sport select committee in the wake of Tuesday’s hearing.
In a letter from Thomas Capdevielle, the organisation’s anti-doping senior manager, that has been seen by the Guardian, it challenged the committee’s chair, Jesse Norman, over how he could have alluded to Radcliffe’s name if he did not know the contents of the leaked database.
Before the hearing, to which the IAAF was not invited, it had written to the committee to reiterate it was of “critical importance that no names or individual blood data or results are discussed in the context of a public hearing or otherwise in the course of proceedings before the committee”.
It pointed to an official statement from the World Anti-Doping Agency that said it was “irresponsible and potentially libellous” to conclude any athlete was doping on the basis of the evidence in the database.
Other witnesses, including the anti-doping expert Dr Michael Ashenden and the Wada director general, David Howman, appeared to be careful in ensuring they did not refer to individuals. But the IAAF queried how Norman could allude to “potentially the winners or medallists at the London marathon, potentially British athletes” if he had not been advised of the contents of the database. During the hearing, Norman said no members of the committee had seen the database.
The letter also asked the committee, which has yet to respond, to confirm whether or not the contents of the IAAF’s earlier missive had been circulated to all its members and witnesses. The leaked database contains more than 12,000 blood values from 5,000 athletes over an 11-year period.
Following the hearing, which resulted in Radcliffe’s lengthy statement and a round of media interviews in which she strenuously denied cheating and claimed her blood values had been misinterpreted, Norman rounded on the media.
He said no names had been mentioned and claimed the press had acted like a “herd of ungulates”. But Radcliffe said she was left with no choice but to go public after seeing the quote from Norman.
Damian Collins, who sits on the committee, said it planned to call Lord Coe to a second hearing on the subject. Coe is expected to attend, perhaps alongside an IAAF anti doping expert.
In the wake of the original Sunday Times stories, which alleged the IAAF failed to follow up on hundreds suspicious blood tests between 2001 and 2012, the governing body said it was impossible to use any readings from before 2009 as proof of doping and strenuously rejected the charge that it had been negligent.
The Sunday Times, in turn, has defended its journalism in the wake of Radcliffe’s claim she had been effectively blackmailed by the newspaper.
The latest wave of claims came in the wake of allegations of endemic doping in Russia and wider claims of corruption and collusion in December, which are being investigated by an independent ethics committee led by Michael Beloff QC and a Wada commission led by Dick Pound.
Professor Ross Tucker, who runs the Science of Sport blog, said that individual off-score values alone could not prove or disprove doping because they needed to be examined in comparison with others taken over a longer period time.
“Off-score values are only part of the picture, which is why releasing three off-scores is not conclusive of anything, even if they are close to those cut-off limits,” he said.
