London Marathon 2016 can mark start of 'new era' for athletics after doping scandal, says race chief David Bedford

New era: This year's event can help athletics recover from the recent doping scandal
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Guy Aspin19 January 2016

This year's Virgin Money London Marathon can mark the start of a new era for athletics following the "disaster zone" of doping and corruption revelations which have brought the sport to its knees, according to race chief David Bedford.

Last week's World Anti-Doping Agency report laid bare the ingrained corruption at the IAAF, but Bedford agreed with the report's author Dick Pound that Lord Coe was the right man to reform the beleaguered world governing body.

The London Marathon on Tuesday announced the field for the men's race, with reigning champion Eliud Kipchoge and two-time winner and fellow Kenyan Wilson Kipsang set to battle it out on the streets of the capital on April 24. World record holder Dennis Kimetto and Ethiopia's track great Kenenisa Bekele, the triple Olympic gold medallist, are also in the field.

"I think we can have trust in the field we have," said Bedford, the former race director who remains responsible for assembling the event's elite fields.

"All athletes who are in our field will be tested far more regularly than probably at any time in the past. So with the additional funding from us and the support of the testing authorities, that I think takes us a long way forward."

The World Marathon Majors, of which London is a part, have financed, in association with the IAAF, increased out-of-competition testing for athletes at its events.

Bedford, who said Coe was "the best person we have in the sport to solve the problems that we have", added: "I think it will take more than one year for us to start to feel that we have perhaps turned the corner.

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"But I think that once we move away from the disaster zone that we have been in and move to a situation where administrators at all levels understand we have to ensure we have a clean sport, we have to ensure there is no corruption around our sport, then I think in years to come we will hopefully see that the London Marathon 2016 really marked the start in distance running terms of a new generation."

Bedford knows only too well the damage caused by doping. Russian marathon runner Liliya Shobukhova - the athlete extorted of hundreds of thousands of pounds by IAAF officials to cover up her doping, who then turned whisleblower to help expose the corruption Pound said was "embedded" in the organisation - won in London in 2010. She was stripped of the title.

Pound's report, the remit of which was limited to Russian doping, named Kenya as another country suspected of widespread blood doping and where drug testing was problematic.

Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

In November three of the leading officials in Kenyan athletics - including Athletics Kenya's president Isaiah Kiplagat and vice-president David Okeyo - were provisionally suspended by the IAAF's ethics commission after being accused of subverting anti-doping processes and siphoning off sponsorship money from Nike.

But Kipsang insists he now has faith in his federation and believes the country is finally confronting the doping problem head on.

"I think 2016 will be good for Kenya because everything is brought to light and we can now talk, we can now share views that can really boost athletics and control issues that are affecting the sport," he said.

"Athletes are now fully informed that we need a cleaner sport and we should at all times try to make sure that we run and win fairly."

Meanwhile, Michael Johnson has branded the scandal at the IAAF worse than that which has engulfed FIFA, telling the BBC: "If you think about the victims, it is absolutely worse."

The four-time Olympic gold medallist called for a completed overhaul of the way the organisation was structured.

"It is the governing body - and the very structure of the governing body - that has allowed this type of corruption," he said.

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