Sergey Bubka and Sebastian Coe hit the home straight in battle to lead world athletics body
The winner of the IAAF presidency vote in Beijing on Wednesday faces a huge task to salvage the doping-tainted sport
Athletics legends Sergey Bubka and Sebastian Coe will go head-to-head on Wednesday in their bid to become president of the sport's world body, with the winner facing a major overhaul to salvage the doping-tainted sport.
After months of criss-crossing the globe wooing support from the 214 member federations that make up the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), 51-year-old Bubka and Coe, 58, face the final act in a vast Beijing convention centre.
I have laid the foundations for the future of the IAAF with our two great champions - whoever the IAAF athletics family elects, he will be a bona fide son of our sport
The 214 members will go to the ballot box to elect the successor to Lamine Diack, the 82-year-old Senegalese who is stepping down after 16 years in charge.
Diack has hailed the sporting pedigree of the two candidates: Bubka won Olympic pole vault gold in 1988 for Ukraine and was also a 10-time world champion, while Coe was a two-time Olympic 1,500m gold medallist for Britain in 1980 and 1984.
The IAAF meeting, Diack said, "heralds the arrival of a new president who has the task to build the future of our sport".
"I am confident of what we have in store as neither of the candidates will find themselves in an unfamiliar environment.
"I have laid the foundations for the future of the IAAF with our two great champions - whoever the IAAF athletics family elects, he will be a bona fide son of our sport."
The IAAF has in recent weeks been at the centre of allegations of widespread cheating, after said a leaked database of 12,000 blood tests from 5,000 athletes revealed "extraordinary" levels of doping.
The IAAF hit back at those allegations as "sensationalist and confusing", and also rejected later claims it suppressed publication of research that 29 to 34 per cent of the 1,800 competitors at the 2011 Daegu worlds had violated anti-doping rules in the previous 12 months.
The world championships get under way in Beijing on Saturday.
