SINGAPORE — International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) president Sebastian Coe sat through a three-hour grilling in the British Parliament yesterday over the doping scandal that has engulfed the sport. But a former team-mate of Coe’s in the British track-and-field team, Steve Cram, is confident that he can survive the turbulent times.

Coe, a two-time 1,500m Olympic champion, vowed to take track and field out of the abyss after the sport was plunged into crisis last month over a report by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) detailing systematic, state-sponsored doping and corruption in Russia.

“I don’t feel sorry for Seb now,” said Cram, 55, who was speaking on the sidelines of the inaugural Mass Participation Asia Conference at the Conrad Centennial. “On a personal level, obviously, I know him very well. You need people with integrity, a real desire to want to improve things.

“What would happen if Seb is not the IAAF president? Who else could do it? Seb has got to be allowed the time to get athletics right. It is a huge opportunity to make a real impact, to do what he has done in the past, too — to be a real leader.”

Cram, though, offers quite a grim view of the fight against doping in sports. He believes that, besides Russia, there are more widespread cases of doping in other parts of the world.

“Sports will never get rid of drugs. It won’t”, said Cram, who won the 1,500m gold medal at the 1983 World Championships and the 1,500m silver medal at the 1984 Olympic Games (behind Coe).

“We will do our best to catch as many people as we can, but we can never stop it. I think we will be naive to not think that there is a systematic cheating going on historically, perhaps now as well, in other parts of the world.

“The idea that Russia is cheating in sports is no big surprise. The surprise was that somebody came up and was brave enough to talk about it. So I am actually quite in favour of whistleblowing. We need to increasingly see how we can encourage that in a right way. That’s what we need to catch the athletes, the managers, the coaches, the infrastructure that creates it and the platforms for that.”

Cram believes there are a few factors that will ensure that doping will continue to be a problem in sports: More money in sports now than in the past; the human tendency to take the easier way out; the lack of funding and the right people in the fight against doping; and the inadequacy of WADA’s current measures.

“It all comes down to funding,” he said. “So to make sure every country has an independent drug tester is important. We didn’t have one in the United Kingdom until fairly recently. In the UK, it used to be the UK Sports (organisation) that was funding the country’s sports to win medals, and also doing the drug testing. You can see how that looks on the outside.

“So we need to have the anti-drug testing body that does not have to answer to — as you can see from Russia’s case — the politicians.

“So WADA has got to do a better job, too. They got to know that just by accrediting a lab, it isn’t enough. They need to check that on a regular basis. Again, that requires funding. I think WADA does not have enough funding to do its job as well as it would like, and as well as it could.”

As for the crisis in Russian sports, Cram hopes that the ban on the Russian athletics federation will be lifted before the 2016 Olympics. But he said it cannot be helped that innocent athletes may lose their chance to compete in Rio should the ban not be lifted in time.

“I don’t think that it is unfair. You’ve got to have drastic measures for change,” he said.

“We can’t concentrate on the athlete level. The fact is there are people involved in Russian sports right up to the very top who seemed to be on a systematic cheating roster, putting people in teams and asking people to do certain things.

“So you’ve got to take those people out. And for them to change that behaviour, the only option we have is to ban Russia as a nation.

“It is now for clean athletes to put pressure on the federation. It is a bit like athletes on a relay team: If it is found that someone has cheated, all lose their medals. Russia has got to move forward as one.”