Coe faces new grilling by MPs

IAAF chief Sebastian Coe could yet face further questions from MPs after being accused of giving ‘untrue’ and ‘contradictory’ evidence to a parliamentary select committee.

IAAF chief Sebastian Coe could yet face further questions from MPs after being accused yesterday of giving ‘untrue’ and ‘contradictory’ evidence to a parliamentary select committee investigating blood doping in athletics.

Coe and IAAF anti-doping chief Thomas Capdevielle came under fire from a team of scientists who claim the international governing body has blocked the publication of a study that suggests between 29 and 45 per cent of athletes at the 2011 World Athletics Championships may have been on drugs.

Commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency, researchers from the highly respected University of Tubingen in Germany also collected their findings from the Pan-Arab Games in the same year.

As a Department of Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) statement said yesterday, Coe and Capdevielle ‘were discussing the Committee’s publication of a research study that as yet has been withheld by the IAAF from publication in a scientific journal’ when they appeared before MPs in December.

In a letter to committee chairman Jesse Norman MP, published yesterday under Parliamentary privilege, University of Tubingen chancellor Georg Sandberger and Professor Rolf Ulrich, the study’s lead author, wrote: ‘Lord Coe and Mr Capdevielle rejected to give clear answers to your questions why IAAF still withholds the release of the study for publication in a scientific journal.

‘Their statements are contradictory and... in parts also untrue.

‘Further withholding the results of this study is also an enormous damage to the efforts of combating doping and against scientific freedom.

‘Lord Coe repeatedly claimed that the paper was rejected by several journals. This claim is wrong. The paper was never submitted to several journals. In an equally erroneous statement, Thomas Capdevielle claimed that “it was already published eight times”.’

The IAAF said: ‘Confusion stems from the definition of “published” as, at the time of the hearing, the study had been published on CMS select committee’s website and it had been “rejected” for peer review in a scientific publication. The IAAF has no objection to the study being published but it is not in a position to officially endorse the research as it has never received the underlying data on which the study was based. This data has been requested.’

Damian Collins MP said: ‘I think Lord Coe has a lot more questions to answer. I can only speak personally, and not for the select committee, but it remains an option to call him back in.’

© Daily Mail