Long-distance great Paula Radcliffe says Seb Coe is the right man to clean up athletics

IAAF president Sebastian Coe takes a look at a paper during a press conference about Wada's Independent Commission Report in Munich, Germany, on Thursday, January 14, 2016. Kerstin Joensson / AP Photo

DUBAI // Paula Radcliffe has thrown her support behind IAAF president Sebastian Coe in his efforts to clean up athletics following recent doping and corruption revelations, saying she believes he is the ideal man for the job.

“I don’t see another candidate out there right now who is prepared to do the work that is needed to be done,” Radcliffe, the marathon world-record holder said of Coe. “He’s aware of that and has sacrificed a lot to put himself in a position to be able to give something back to our sport.”

Speaking at the launch of the 2016 Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon, which takes place on Friday, Radcliffe said: “I think it’s going to be tough; he’s had a very rough ride to the start of his presidency.

“He was probably expecting a little bit of that but maybe not to that extent. But I do believe that it is very determined to do the best that he can for his sport and to drive through the changes as well as he can. Now the athletics community needs to get behind him and support him to give him a chance.”

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Radcliffe also said she was hurt at having been dragged into the scandal by reports of cheating that have since been discredited.

“It’s been a tough year really, a lot of stress on me and my family,” Radcliffe said. “Because when somebody makes an accusation against you that’s not true, then you’ve got to wait for different bodies and different federations to be able to back you in being able to prove that. That makes it tough.

“When you know you haven’t done anything wrong it helps you to stay strong, but at the same time it hurts to be attacked personally, especially in something that I felt so strongly against.”

Despite having her name cleared by the International Association of Athletics Federation in November this month by World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), Radcliffe is not letting the matter rest.

“I still feel that there has been damage done to my reputation and I would like to see an apology,” she said. “I would like to see some kind of accountability taken by journalists at the Sunday Times and by the scientists for having offered their opinion without an understanding of the data. They need to apologise.”

Radcliffe is strongly opposed to a recent proposal by UK Athletics to wipe all world records from the books and start again. She says a better policy is increasing deterrents and investment in testing, with retrospective changing of records if guilt is proven.

“I’m not a supporter of it,” she said. “I think it was a suggestion that was made with good intentions at heart but that wasn’t properly thought through, because then you’re talking about throwing out all area records, all national records as well. You’re penalising a lot of clean athletes in there who would have been competing against the kind of people who had been cheating during their career, so you’re kind of punishing them twice over.”

Radcliffe is not sure the scandal will cast a shadow over this summer’s Olympics in Rio.

“Yes and no,” she said, “because all of these things are coming to light, nobody has got away with the corruption side of it, and its kind of moving the anti-doping fight forward as well.

“I think we’ve got a chance of the Rio Olympics being cleaner than Olympics in the past. We have to look on the positive side of it and be able to group together as much as we can, get the people who care about athletics behind it to work together to making sure our sport comes out of this and moves forward in a good way.”​

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