These are grim days for world sport.

International athletics resembles a swampland in the wake of damaging claims about doping cover-ups and general malfeasance, potentially rendering the Rio Olympics a farce.

All this, of course, mere months after the lid was lifted on world football’s toxic machinations which stretched all the way to South Africa and far beyond.

Little of this should shock. The Tour de France scandal inured many of us to the cold realities of modern sport. Years before, the Salt Lake City scandal, with bribery and dirt-peddling at its core, also confirmed suspicion of the way international sport often works.

Flamboyant Lalit Modi, who used to sashay through South Africa, was thrown out of Indian cricket for life and Allen Stanford, the shaky financier, is doing 110 years in jail for massive fraud. Hansie Cronje, of course, exposed cricket’s murky underworld in a manner never seen before or since.

Few major administrations have been untouched.

What makes this latest scandal potentially the worst of all is how complicit the executives appear to have been. Although the Russians are on the defensive, denying everything, there’s dirt everywhere you look. They’ve run out of carpet to sweep it under, rendering their denials laughable.

Lamine Diack, the former head of the IAAF, has been arrested on suspicion of corruption with claims that he both took cash and turned a blind eye to positive dope tests. And to think, one of the London Olympics’ rallying calls was that it would be the cleanest Olympics ever. The IAAF is said to have allowed 10 athletes with “unexplained and highly suspicious” blood profiles to compete.

One by one the miscreants are being run out of town.

All of this has fallen into the lap of Sebastian Coe, one-time blue-eyed boy of athletics, who now presides over the IAAF. When the air around his sport began to smell, his response was to utter a “declaration of war” against those pointing fingers. It was poor judgment on his part and he is reminded of this at every turn.

The problem for athletics is that the next Olympics are around the corner. The IAAF is under great pressure to suspend Russia until it sorts its nonsense out. Right now, the Russians are in a state of denial from Vladimir Putin down. They are playing the victim when the facts are compelling and ugly. Even if half the allegations are true, this would represent the biggest state-sponsored doping programme since East Germany in the 1970s.

The problem for athletics is that Russia is one of the powerhouses of the sport. It routinely finishes in the top three at Olympic Games and, naturally, carries heavy political clout. This shouldn’t matter, but in sport influence and patronage are the common currency. The IAAF surely knows what it must do, but fears the ramifications would reverberate from Red Square to every corner of the world.

Too bad. Anything less than a suspension of the Russians would be affirmation that the IAAF panders to the political elite. Even Russian anti-doping officials have been held up as frauds, rendering the country’s entire athletics system a sham.

If the IAAF takes a soft line, the Rio Olympics could be irredeemably polluted by suspicion. It’s one thing when athletes dope, quite another when they do so with the complicity of their federation. Sport becomes a farce in such circumstances, with integrity and good standing thrown to the wind.

The corollary of all this is that you no longer know what, or who, to believe. We see astonishing performances in track and field on a weekly basis, but can we really be sure what we are seeing?

Cricket still throws up mysterious results. South African soccer doesn’t seem to want to get its hands dirty over match-fixing claims involving the national team. The list of SA athletes suspended for doping infractions in the past year runs to seven pages, according to the SA Institute for Drug-Free Sport.

The IAAF must show the way by taking the kid gloves off. Statements mean nothing without action. Hot air needs to be replaced by sharp action.

This is the crossroads. Condemnation or commendation awaits. – © Sunday Tribune