Lord Coe: ‘Mr President’ offers good grounds to laugh in his face

He doesn’t believe there is a democratic or moral value in others holding him to account

IAAF president Sebastian Coe had a £100,000-a-year deal with Nike (Getty)

Nobody smirked when Sebastian Coe addressed the question of the institutionally cheating athletics nation of Russia being banned from athletics by saying: “The issue is going to be a synthesis of the conclusion of the criteria.” That was a real shame because Coe has been smirking and belittling journalists for quite a long time now. Pretty much whenever the crass conflict of interests of his £100,000-a-year Nike sinecure, complete with car parking space at Nike HQ (“Sebastian Coe – Reserved”) has come up, in fact.

There was one of those rather vicious little comments from Coe for a reporter at the International Association of Athletics Federations Congress press conference in Beijing earlier this year, when Nike surfaced again. The digs sometimes keep coming when the cameras are off, too. Coe doesn’t believe there is a democratic or moral value in others holding him to account, you see. He handed up his Nike gig and said his Chime Communications agency would not be taking money from IAAF from now on – but not because of the screaming conflicts of interest. Simply because those who posed the questions had got it all wrong and created “mangled perceptions”, as he put it. More good grounds for a laugh at “Mr President”, as he allows the IAAF to call him.

The contradictions in his talk were so transparent that it confirmed the impression that he is convinced all journalists are intellectually challenged. He’d been thinking of giving up the Nike attachment for some time, he said. The revelation by the BBC’s Mark Daly that he had lobbied for Eugene, Nike’s founding city, to get the 2021 World Athletics Championships, had nothing to do with it. Yet he’s been telling anyone who asks, these past weeks, that he’s giving up nothing.

Of course, he’s used to getting his way where newspapers are concerned. His Nike income proved very useful when his libel action case against The Sun looked like it would set him back £100,000 in 1984. He was wrongly accused by the paper of acting boorishly at an annual Athletics Writers’ Association event and was not having it. Coe doorstepped editor Kelvin MacKenzie at the paper’s office in Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street, and later sued the backside off the paper. “I was lucky in that by then I had Nike and some other sponsors,” he later reflected.

His press conference droned on and on, with the same blithe unawareness that athletics stands in the face of a crisis. The world was waiting to know how Russia would be dealt with and these boys started by relating that Ashton Eaton and Genzebe Dibaba were athletes of the year. Does Coe’s decision to end Chime’s IAAF work mean that he will no longer be involved in the company’s lucrative work allotting the “hundreds of millions” of pounds he says are at the company’s disposal, to win contracts telling countries and cities how to host big sporting events? That, like much else, is unclear. Ridiculous, risible question, he will probably say when next asked.