IAAF banned Russian athletes for 'sporting integrity', insists Coe

Sebastian Coe explained why Russian and Belarusian athletes were banned from the Paris Olympics.

Transcript

00:00The judgment was very clear that it's, and I've been to Ukraine, there is a

00:08track and field team coming here that would normally be 70 plus, it's now under

00:1330. There are many of the male members of that team fighting on the front, the

00:20coaches have been denuded in that system. It is a very constrained world that

00:26those athletes are having to operate within and also in the

00:31domestic federation. And we looked at this as being a matter of integrity. Was

00:36it fair that those athletes that were going to be so disadvantaged should also

00:43have athletes from a country that, you know, demonstrated such

00:48aggression? And it was really about the integrity of the sport. We have no

00:52intention of making political pronouncements or deciding that, you

00:57know, we are a second United Nations. We're not. We are the world athletics,

01:02but from time to time we will make judgments that sit at the heart of what

01:07we believe to be, you know, the integrity of a sport and those are the

01:12decisions that we will continue to make. And this, by the way, this was a unanimous

01:18decision of a council.