Interview with the President of the Polish Athletics Association, Jerzy Skucha, on the avalanche of scandals in athletics and their consequences for Poland.
Marcin Piątek: – Former president of the World Athletics Federation (IAAF), Lamine Diack, arrested for corruption. In Russian athletics, doping is a state-sponsored system. Did this surprise you?
Jerzy Skucha: – As for Diack, he is a sensation. He is rich and has already run for president of Senegal. He competed with his family and they led a VIP life at the expense of the IAAF. Well, it is, one could say, a style of being inherent to this office. He resigned from his position this summer, but not because the field was slipping away from him. He had already declared a few years earlier that he would leave power after 16 years in office.
Do you know him well?
I think I spoke to him once, at the World Indoor Championships in Sopot. That created a distance. Now, when Sebastian Coe (double Olympic gold medallist in the 1,500m and head of the London Olympics organising committee – ed.) is in charge, it is clear that things can be different. We are kept informed of everything. He is even helping us organise a training camp in Brazil before the Rio Olympics – there are beautiful facilities there that are exclusively available to the British. I told him about sharing it with us. And Sebastian said he would try to help.
And the Russian case?
I am relieved. The fact that the Russians have something to hide has been felt for many years. They skipped many competitions, disappeared somewhere, and then showed up at key events and won medals. There is one trick we are talking about: getting out of the list. The idea is to get out of the group of the top 30 competitors in a given competition, subject to constant surveillance by doping controllers.
Polityka 47/2015 (3036) of November 17, 2015; People and Styles; p.100
Original title of the text: “The medals will arrive by post”
