Lord Coe wants Mo Farah will be lauded rather than suspected after the Londoner became the first man to win the distance double at three major championships.
Farah entered the athletics world championships in Beijing with his coach, Alberto Salazar, at the centre of doping allegations - all of which he has denied. The Mogadishu-born runner managed to put all that controversy behind him as he fought off repeated attempts by his Kenyan rivals to deny him his sixth and seventh world titles.
“Mo is a wonderful athlete,” said the incoming president of the International Association of Athletics Federations. “I have watched his progress from the junior ranks, I’ve stood at the side of tracks when he’s been competing and I’ve awarded him medals when he was a junior athlete.
“This is part of the challenge we have. I remember breaking the world mile record in 1981 and I was dubbed by most people an overnight sensation. I had to remind them it had taken me 10 years to get to that position since joining my first athletics club.
“We have to be careful here when we start making assumptions about quality and unpredictable performances. Often in the largest part it is down to innate ability, hard work, focus and probably somewhere in the locker about ten years of road mileage and thousands of tons of steel in the gym and people who have given up a large part of their lives to help you.”
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He added: “You would be hard pressed to say that he [Farah] wasn’t the most successful distance runner in terms of medals.But there are other things that you need to throw into the balance - world records, times, speeds, all those sorts of things.
“He is a wonderful athlete, I’ll leave the greatest-ever tag to others. If I conceded that I would lose a lifelong friendship with Daley Thompson.”
Coe said his plans to move towards an independent anti-doping agency for athletics were no reflection on the work currently being done as he again launched a defence of the IAAF, saying there was no doubt it had done everything in its power to root out drug cheats.
“It is ostensibly a clean sport and nobody would deny that, and it is a global challenge that every sport faces,” he said.
“Can it be cleaner? I hope so. Are there things that we can do differently in the future, I dare say so. Can we do more? Most certainly but that’s the human condition.”
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Coe said another job for the IAAF was to bring more profile to other athletes in addition to Usain Bolt, the sprinter who said this week that he might retire after next year’s Olympics in Brazil.