Russian Athletics Makes Sebastian Coe the Target of Its Court Case

Russia’s athletics federation says the man keeping its athletes out of international competition is Sebastian Coe, and it is taking that argument to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

Boris Yaryshevsky, the All-Russian Athletics Federation’s executive director, made the case to Russian state news agency TASS during the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. The interview ran on Sept. 4 and was translated into English by The Sports Examiner. Russia went to CAS in July over its athletes’ eligibility, days after the World Athletics Council voted to keep Russians and Belarusians out, and filed again in August. Yaryshevsky said the second claim seeks the federation’s own reinstatement, that Russia wants the eligibility case heard first because of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, and that neither has a hearing date.

Russian athletics has been shut out twice, for separate reasons, and only one of those bans still runs. The IAAF suspended the federation in November 2015, after WADA’s independent commission reported on state-backed doping. World Athletics lifted that suspension on March 23, 2023, attaching 35 conditions, and reaffirmed the same day the measure it had imposed a year earlier after the invasion of Ukraine, which bars Russian and Belarusian athletes and officials from international competition. That second ban is the one both CAS claims are aimed at.

What Coe Said in Birmingham

Coe said in mid-August that he would appear at CAS in person, the line Yaryshevsky has built on. Speaking to reporters at the European Athletics Championships in Birmingham and quoted by Al Jazeera, he said: “Well, I will be in the court of arbitration defending that position. That’s how I feel about it.” He called the case a matter of “the integrity of competition” and “not about politics or passports,” and set out the principle beneath it: “The primacy of an international federation to determine what eligibility looks like in your sport is the base of the pyramid.”

World Athletics Points to Ukraine

The Council gave its reasons in July, and they were about Ukraine. Its published summary of the 241st meeting, held on July 1 and 2, pointed to how hard it has become to stage domestic competition there, to the athletes who cannot reach qualifying standards because of it, and to what it called a “severely compromised” athletics infrastructure. Coe said the sanctions protect the fairness of competition, and that no “tangible movement towards peace negotiations” had materialised. Ukraine’s sports minister, Matvii Bidnyi, said in July that 760 athletes and coaches have been killed since Russia’s full-scale invasion began, and that 915 sports facilities have been destroyed or damaged. World Athletics started a fund for Ukrainian athletes in 2022.

Yaryshevsky puts all of it down to one man. His argument is that Coe has taken the matter up as a private cause, that the promise to turn up at CAS in person proves as much, and that the arbitrators should weigh a president acting on personal feeling. He also raised the changes the IOC made to the Olympic Charter in June, which he said tightened its requirements on political neutrality. World Athletics has not commented publicly since the interview appeared. When Russia’s first claim landed in July, it said it would be “strenuously defending our position.”

He believes the process is being dragged out on purpose, so the cases run past the World Athletics presidential election in September 2027. Coe is term-limited out at that election. He was re-elected in Budapest in August 2023, the constitution caps a president at three terms of four years, and World Athletics said then that this would be his last. The Congress that picks his successor meets in Beijing days before the world championships.

The IOC has gone the other way. It provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee in July and set aside the neutral-athlete requirement, a decision Ukraine’s Olympic committee has since challenged at the same court. World Athletics turned down an IOC recommendation to readmit Belarus in May and has kept its own ban in place since. Russian track and field athletes last raced under their own flag at a world championships in Beijing in 2015, less than three months before the doping suspension. The next one is back in Beijing, from Sept. 11 to 19, 2027.