Coe slams doping claims

Sebastian Coe, former Olympic champion and presidential candidate for the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), has called mass doping allegations a "declaration of war" on his sport of track and field.

British newspaper The Sunday Times and German broadcaster ARD had revealed the surprising prevalence of abnormal blood tests in athletics, with access to 12,000 blood tests from 5,000 athletes between 2001 and 2012.

Around one-third of the athletes who won endurance events at Olympic Games and world championships between 2001 and 2012 had submitted suspicious tests, which has raised concerns about the credibility of the sport. The IAAF has "strongly rejected" claims of widespread doping.

Coe feels that track and field has been betrayed by the recent media reports. The 58-year-old, influential in organizing the successful 2012 Olympic Games in London, has called the allegations a "declaration of war" on athletics.

"I take pretty grave exception to that," said Coe in an exclusive interview with the Associated Press news agency. "This, for me, is a fairly seminal moment. There is nothing in our history of competence and integrity in drug-testing that warrants this kind of attack.

"We should not be cowering. We should come out fighting. The fightback has to start here. We cannot be portrayed as a sport that is in any way dragging our heels."

IAAF tests are robust

Coe will go head-to-head with Ukrainian Sergei Bubka for election as successor to Lamine Diack on August 19 in Beijing. Doping is almost certainly expected to be a huge topic of contention and there have been suggestions that the IAAF hasn't done enough to weed out suspicious athletes.

"I don't think anyone should underestimate the anger which is felt in our sport at the betrayal of our sport in the last few days," he added in a further interview with the BBC.

"That in some way we sit on our hands, at best, and at worst are complicit in a cover up, is just not borne out by anything we have done as a sport in the past 15 years," Coe said.

"We have led the way on out-of-competition independent testing, we have led the way on laboratories, we were the first sport to have arbitration panels, we introduced blood passports in 2009 because we wanted to elevate the science around weeding out the cheats."

The Englishman was just as defensive when asked about the world's athletic governing body withholding information on doping tests: "The assumption that we are not sharing this information is wholly false," Coe emphasized.