Lamine Diack (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images for IAAF)
The former head of global athletics Lamine Diack, who presided over
the sport from 1999 to 2015 but was later convicted for corruption, has
died aged 88, his family told AFP.
The Senegalese was head of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), now renamed World Athletics.
Diack,
who was also a powerful figure at the International Olympic Committee
(IOC), was found guilty of corruption by a French court in 2020 for
covering up Russian doping cases in exchange for millions of dollars of
bribes.
He was sentenced to four years in prison, of which two were suspended, and fined €500 000 ($560 000).
The
trial in Paris heard that the money was paid in return for “full
protection”, to allow Russian athletes who should have been banned to
escape punishment.
Some 23 Russian athletes had their doping
offences hushed up so they could compete at the 2012 London Olympics and
2013 world championships in Moscow.
Because of his age, Diack, a
former long jumper, football coach and then businessman and politician
who was decorated in the Kremlin in late 2011, was spared jail.
His
son Papa Massata Diack, a former marketing executive for the IAAF, was
tried in absentia because Senegal refused to extradite him. He was
sentenced to five years in prison, fined one million euros and banned
from all sport for 10 years.
Lamine Diack, a member of the IOC
from 1999 to 2013 and then an honorary member from 2014-15, was
embroiled in another corruption affair linked to the awarding of the
2016 Rio Olympics and the Tokyo Olympics, that were postponed because of
the pandemic but took place this year.
Despite not being jailed
over the Russian corruption, he was held in France because of his
indictment in the case involving suspected Olympic vote-buying. His
passport had been confiscated.
But a judge soon lifted the ban on Diack leaving France, provided he paid a bond and that he continued to respond to summonses.
Senegalese
Premier League side Jaraaf de Dakar, where Diack was club president,
said it had sold part of its headquarters property to pay the bail.
Diack
was replaced by Britain’s Sebastian Coe in August 2015 as head of world
athletics. The disgraced Senegalese had resigned from the IOC in the
same year.
Coe had been one of Diack’s vice-presidents at the then-IAAF between 2011 and 2014.