Exclusive – Sebastian Coe: ‘I know our sport can never be the same again’ – Telegraph.co.uk

Manifestly, it is. This is a role Coe has coveted all his career, not that he ever imagined it would be quite such a galling or solitary experience. There could be worse to come, too. Soon the US Anti-Doping Agency will publish their investigation into the methods of polarising super-coach Alberto Salazar, and later in the year French prosecutors are poised to uncover the full scale of corruption under past IAAF president Lamine Diack, once fatefully described by Coe as his “spiritual leader”. “There have been ethics boards, independent commissions, police investigations,” he says, wearily. “That is a ghastly scene.”

Nothing could be more central to his duties than the task of restoring trust in a shattered sport. A favourite theme of his is the work that athletics can do to convince children that this is not solely the preserve of cheats and charlatans. “In many ways, this is a post-sporting world,” Coe argues. “At the age of 11, I joined an athletics club. By 13, I was training every day. By 20, I was running 80-100 miles a week. The environment that young people inhabit now has fundamentally changed. But we need to persuade them that this sport will give them skills to stand them in extremely good stead.”

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He has no time, plainly, for the fatalistic outlook of Carl Lewis, who claimed at last week’s US Olympic Summit in Los Angeles that athletics was “dying” due to falling attendances and public cynicism “Carl was very, very distant from the sport for many years,” he says of the nine-time Olympic champion. “After he retired, he did very little, and has only lately come back to a coaching role.”

There are deeper anxieties over how athletics can possibly cope with the absence of Usain Bolt, who will retire by next summer at the latest. When I asked Coe a similar question in Beijing last year, he sounded bullish that the sport would find other superstars to champion, but now he does not seem so sure. “He’s going to leave a massive void, there’s no doubt. You’d look at me open-mouthed if I said anything different about the most widely-recognised sporting face on the planet. I can’t think of anybody besides Mohammad Ali who has had such global visibility as Usain in the last 50 years.”