LONDON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said he was as frustrated as anyone at the farcical situation surrounding the legal world record belonging to banned Kenyan Ruth Chepngetich's marathon but added that the governing body's hands are tied.
Chepngetich's astonishing two hours, nine minutes and 56 seconds run in Chicago in October 2024 remains the legal world record even though she was handed a three-year anti-doping ban this year, with her results expunged only from March.
Her excuse that she took her housemaid's medicine was dismissed by the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), which says it is continuing to investigate Chepngetich for other potential violations.
"I share your frustration, but I'm not a lawyer," Coe told journalists in a conference call to review the year in athletics.
"There are some legal challenges that the burden of proof can only be a positive test and evidence that doping infringement was taking place at the time of the performance and if you don't have that it's extremely difficult to extrapolate around other events.
"The AIU does everything that it possibly can, but it does also have to work within legal strictures - however frustrating that is."
Chepngetich was one of a series of high-profile dopers to be caught this year, with elite American sprinters Marvin Bracy, Erriyon Knighton and Fred Kerley also earning suspensions.
This week AIU chairman David Howman, who served as the World Anti-Doping Agency's Director General for 13 years, said the anti-doping system has stalled.
"Intentional dopers at elite level are evading detection. We are not effective enough nowadays in catching cheats ... it is hurting the anti-doping movement's credibility," he said.
Coe, however, was not quite so gloomy about the situation.
"I think what David is saying is that we have to go beyond," he said.
"It's very important that all our anti-doping organisations are working absolutely optimally. We have to really focus on intelligent testing. We have got to use AI much more to be able to really turbo-charge that intelligent testing to the allocation of resources where it really is going to matter."
Coe was obviously more upbeat when discussing the success of this year's World Championships in Tokyo and looking forward to the inaugural Ultimate Championships in Budapest next September.
"It wasn't that long ago we were talking about one or two major talents and now we are talking about a bandwidth of talent emerging across all our disciplines," he said. "This is an extraordinary era.
"In Tokyo we had 84 countries that reached a final - the highest ever. In Tokyo in 1991 it was 47. I can't think of another sport where we would be talking about that."
Looking ahead to the Ultimate Championships, the new one-weekend hit with the absolute cream competing in a succession of finals, Coe added: "We didn't have that one big global moment in World Athletics that we have on three of the four years.
"Filling the fourth year is an important concept. We need a billion people watching our sport on an annual basis at the right moment of the season and we wanted to create something new and exciting for the athletes.
"We're inviting only the best of the best and it's an historic $10 million prize pot. We really reimagined what that format to eliminate downtime can look like. We want rapidity, we want free-flowing, exciting competition over three nights.
"I think it will be a compelling glimpse at the future."
(Reporting by Mitch Phillips, editing by Ken Ferris)
