Dave Bedford backs Sebastian Coe to lead world athletics despite ignoring doping test blackmail allegations

British former world record holder Dave Bedford has backed Sebastian Coe as “the right man to lead” world athletics despite telling a British Parliamentary Committee earlier this month the now International Association of Athletics Federations president ignored “extremely serious allegations” of a blackmail case over a failed doping test.

Bedford told the Culture Media and Sports Committee that in August 2014 he had sent Coe, who was then the vice-president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) before winning the presidential race in August 2015, an email with an attachment that contained an explosive allegation.

Andrey Baranov, the agent of Russian marathon runner Liliya Shobukhova, claimed she had been blackmailed by Russian and IAAF officials including Papa Missata Diack, the son of then IAAF president Lamine Diack, to the sum of €€450,000 (HK$3.7 million) over a failed dope test.

Bedford, who had initially alerted the two-time Olympic champion to a potential problem with a phone call when he was on holiday in Switzerland earlier that month, admitted Coe is not renowned for replying to emails so he followed it up with a text that also went unanswered.

Coe claims he never opened the attachment and sent it on to the IAAF Ethics Commission, which Bedford had already done, and the first he knew of the allegations was in a German documentary in December 2014.

Former two-time 1500m Olympic champion Coe has led a raft of reforms since replacing disgraced predecessor Lamine Diack as IAAF president and saw his reform package adopted by athletics’ governing body at the end of last year.