The Olympic dreams of a generation of British athletes would be thwarted while Lamine Diack was the global head of athletics. The Senegalese president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) enriched himself by taking bribes worth millions of dollars from Russian athletes in return for covering up their doping violations and allowing them to compete. Some 23 cheating Russian athletes took part in the London 2012 Olympics and the 2013 World Championships in Athletics as a result of the venality of Diack and his accomplices. Among the British athletes known to have lost out on medals in global competitions as a result were the middle-distance runners Lynsey Sharp, Lisa Dobriskey and Jenny Meadows.
The Times journalist Rick Broadbent tweeted: “I once asked Lisa Dobriskey what was worse: Russian state-sponsored doping or Lamine Diack covering up positive tests for cash. Her answer: ‘The president. It’s a betrayal’.”
Whether he was wearing tailored suits or African robes, Diack was an urbane, even amiable, figure whose shock of white hair lent him a distinguished air. A former long jumper whose dream of competing at the Olympic Games in Rome in 1960 was ended by a knee injury, Diack was the third most powerful person in world sport after the president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the president of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (Fifa).
On his appointment in 1999 he promised a belatedly robust response to the doping that was already tarnishing the reputation of athletics. However, like his similarly disgraced counterpart at Fifa, Sepp Blatter, he proceeded to run the organisation as a personal fiefdom. Diack’s 16-year reign as one of the last unchalleged “dictators” in the world of sport came to an end with his arrest in 2015. He would later be convicted of running one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of sport.
Police raided his room at the Sheraton hotel at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on November 1, 2015, and found evidence on his laptop that enabled them to piece together a trail going back to 2011. In a meeting at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow in November 2011 with Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian sports minister Vitaly Mutko, the IAAF treasurer Valentin Balakhnichev, Diack’s son, Papa Massata Diack, who was an IAAF marketing executive, and his lawyer, Habib Cissé, Diack had thrashed out what became known as the “full protection” scheme.
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Over the next few years 23 Russian athletes paid between €100,000 and €600,000 in exchange for having their doping bans covered up, totalling €3.2 million. The scheme was working beautifully until certain officials at the IAAF began asking awkward questions as to why Russian athletes they knew had failed drug tests were being allowed to compete. Emails from Diack’s son outlined payments made to keep IAAF employees quiet, referred to as “lobbying and explanation work”.
Diack was put under house arrest and convicted in September 2020 along with his son and Balakhnichev, as well as Alexei Melnikov, the former senior coach of the Russian athletics team, and Gabriel Dollé, head of the IAAF anti-doping department, who was “paid off” by Diack.
In the face of incontrovertible evidence Diack admitted covering up doping but said he did it to protect the image of the sport, not to make money. He was sentenced to four years in prison, with two suspended, but allowed to serve his sentence under house arrest after his defence counsel claimed that he would die in prison as a result of his poor health. He was fined €500,000 and ordered to repay $16 million to cover cash that had been embezzled from the IAAF and to compensate the organisation for the loss of sponsorship as a result of reputational damage.
Lord (Sebastian) Coe, the British middle-distance champion, replaced Diack as president in August 2015 and pledged to clean up the sport and make the IAAF (renamed World Athletics in 2019) more transparent so that such corruption could never be repeated.
Lamine Diack was born into a privileged family in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, in 1933. He studied law at university in France and won the long jump at the French Athletics Championships in 1958. His personal best of 7.72m was a French and west African record for several years.
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Back in Senegal he became a coach for the football team Foyer France Senegal in 1963 and two years later was appointed technical director of Senegal’s national football team. When the west African country reached the African Cup of Nations final in 1968, political preferments came Diack’s way. He served as secretary of state for youth and sport, mayor of Dakar and, from 1988, senior vice-president of Senegal’s national assembly.
Meanwhile, since the early Seventies, he had risen through the ranks of pan-African sports administration before being voted onto the IAAF council in 1976. He made himself better known, and more popular among African delegates, by refusing to present a gold medal to the British athlete Zola Budd after she won the World Cross Country Championships in 1986, on account of her having been a South African citizen. Diack was appointed IAAF vice-president in 1991.
On the death of the longstanding IAAF president Primo Nebiolo in 1999, Diack took over as acting president. He pledged that the Italian’s autocratic style of leadership was over and in 2001 he was elected president; his slogan was “No popes, no dictators, from now on this is teamwork.” He would be re-elected unopposed three times.
Top of his inbox was dealing with drug cheats, he said, promising that as a former amateur who performed for the love of the sport, he would uphold its Corinthian image. “It is possibly a drawback for me, as it was for Primo, that we did the sport as amateurs and we have presided over an elite for many of whom money is the prime object. But I feel that there are values that should not be lost, a certain ethic,” he told the Financial Times in 1999.
In an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2001, he voiced frustration at the mishandling of a case that enabled the Russian long-distance runner Olga Yegorova to compete at the world championships that summer despite her positive test for EPO, which increases red blood cells and improves aerobic performance.
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He looked kindly on the UK bid to host the World Athletics Championships in 2003 but made no apologies when the competition was given to Paris. He claimed to have been assured as late as March 2001 that Britain would host the championships at a purpose-built stadium at Pickett’s Lock in northeast London. By October 2001 he said he was being offered Sheffield as an alternative and said that British athletics had lost respect at the IAAF. “Did they think I would agree to this without reopening the bidding? I don’t think it has damaged your sport long-term, but it has done nothing for your reputation. I just don’t understand how a country which has such a history in athletics can get it so wrong.”
Ten years later it was Diack’s reputation that was starting to be questioned. The first murmurings of corruption at the IAAF began to surface in 2011. The ethics committee of the IOC announced an investigation into claims made by BBC’s Panorama programme that in 1993 Diack had received kickbacks from the Swiss company ISL in return for the right to negotiate the IAAF’s marketing. At the time Diack claimed risibly that the payments were made by friends after he revealed that his house in Senegal had burnt down. He got off with a warning.
Diack returned to Senegal in May to live out his last months. He remained a popular figure in his home country. He is survived by his wife, Bintou, and his son and co-defendant, Papa, whom he described as a “thug” during his trial.
Lamine Diack, athlete, businessman and sports administrator, was born on June 7, 1933. He died after a long illness on December 3, 2021, aged 88