Ever since he emerged as a slight but scarily competitive athlete in the late Seventies, Coe - or Lord Sebastian Newbold Coe as he does not prefer to be known - has demonstrated on innumerable occasions that he possesses a core as resilient as any of the cutlery that his dad, Peter, once helped engineer for Sheffield Steel. The factors which persuaded the International Olympic Committee to entrust the Games to the London bid, a decision which Coe believes is "probably the most important thing that has ever happened in British sport", are numerous.
Endless attention to detail, a late but telling intervention from the Prime Minister in the hours before the final votes were cast, the endorsement of Nelson Mandela, an inspired presentation to International Olympic Committee delegates in which all spoke with genuine passion and the burden of the plea was carried by the voices of the children who would stand to benefit from a London Games.
If more recent stories are to be believed, the errant finger of the Greek IOC delegate may also have played a part in the third round of voting in which Madrid was eliminated. Holding it all together, however, was the will of a man who had already proved himself one of the great winners in his sport, an athlete who came back from a catastrophic defeat to Steve Ovett in the Moscow Olympics at metres to win Ovett's own specialist event, the m, an athlete who could not even run in because he was so ill, but who returned to the Olympic venue the following year and collected another silver and gold medal Combined with that willpower was an innate political sense which allowed him to intuit the mysterious shifts and balances of power and influence within the IOC, a sense that had been refined by four years struggling against the tide as chief of staff for the Leader of the Opposition, William Hague.
For all its Olympian height, Coe's room is a virtually anonymous ensemble of standard office equipment and utilitarian carpet tiles. There have been less prosaic plaudits for Coe since he clenched his fist in triumph in the ballroom of Singapore's Raffles Plaza Hotel - most recently when he was given a special award at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year. In terms of historical precedents, you cannot help thinking of Sir Francis Drake, who set off on an endeavour of great risk and returned to the court of Queen Elizabeth laden with golden booty.
Coe does not embrace the analogy with any great enthusiasm. Well, a privateer. Don't describe me as a pirate, it will fit every image L'Equipe have of me. But he put himself hugely at hazard by taking over from the previous leader of the bid, Barbara Cassani, in May last year when London was adjudged by the IOC to be running a poor third to Paris and Madrid. I've always accepted if I ever lost a race I got blamed for it, and if I won a race I was the greatest tactician in the world.
I think probably if I'd been hard-nosed and calculating about it I wouldn't have done it. I would have preferred the earlier months to have been slightly easier. But life is marginals, isn't it, at the best of times? It's about timing and belief. Fifty floors below, the London Evening Standard is on sale with a front-page headline "Betrayal of Our Olympics" and a story detailing the Commons row between the sports minister, Richard Caborn, and his Conservative counterpart, Hugh Robertson.
Coe was not personally caught up in any of the doping or corruption allegations, but he had been a member of the IAAF council since and a vice-president since He was asked by MPs at a meeting of the Culture, Media and Sport select committee last year why he had not been more prominent in pressing the doping issue while he was a vice-president.
He told them: "I was certainly not aware of the specific allegations that had been made around the corruption of anti-doping processes in Russia. When he was asked if he was aware of allegations against Diack Jr, Coe replied: "Well, they were allegations that were aired in the ARD documentary.
But evidence seen by the BBC and the Daily Mail external-link reveals that, four months before the German television documentary was broadcast, an email was sent to Coe containing a number of attachments detailing the corruption, extortion and bribery claims, as well as the suggestion Diack Jr could have been involved.
Damian Collins MP, who sits on the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said: "I think his Lord Coe's answer to the select committee was deliberately misleading to create the impression that he was totally unaware of any specific allegations of this kind.
The right thing to do would be to put that information into the hands of the criminal authorities straight away. He added: "If he won't be drawn on the past and what he knew and can't come up with a compelling argument for the way he conducted himself, then I don't see how he could continue as president of the IAAF because he would lack the public support to do so.
In a statement, Coe, who won m gold at the and Olympics, said he was forwarded emails about the corruption allegations, which he then sent on to the IAAF ethics committee, leaving it to investigate. His director of communications, Jackie Brock-Doyle, added: "He did not feel it was necessary to read the attachments. He, and we, would argue that it shows a full duty of care, ensuring the right people in the right place were aware of allegations and were investigating them.
This was almost a year after Coe was sent the email about allegations against Diack Jr and several months after it was revealed the Senegalese had been accused of corruption on a grand scale. Do you remember the very first episode of The Day Today when Chris Morris interviewed the woman from the jam festival which included celebrity jams from the likes of Glennis Kinnock and Sebastian Coe?
Sebastian Coe? I hate Sebastian Coe! Well today you can add "long-jump legend" Bob Beamon to the list of people who hate Sebastian Coe. You see Bob is a little upset that Seb decided to include a picture of him in a promotional brochure for the London bid.
But how could we go through the wonder of the Games and then Michael Gove cuts schools sport? It was not a good decision and that is why I spent the first two years as chair of the legacy group getting the sport premium into primary schools, the extra one-and-a-half days offer, the premium per head - we had to redress that. They addressed it quickly. I said the challenge now is primary-school sport and they let me get on with it.
I will concede we should never have had to do that. Look down there [from his sixth-floor office] and see how many obese people there are waddling along.
Don't confuse two things. The issue with that is less sports participation - I want to see that as high as it can be - but the biggest challenge is not whether 20 more people play rugby league. The big challenge is physical inactivity. It is partly to do with diet, but the issue around physical inactivity is that for years governments have seen it as obesity, therefore public health, therefore the NHS.
But it is about the built environment. You came here today, you went to the lift, there are no stairs. By , 50 per cent of the nation will be physically inactive, just doing enough to get through the day. It won't galvanise the people who don't want to be involved in sport. One of the things I am proudest about with London is that we really did get young people engaged. That is not true.
Nobody can say they cannot do what they want because of facilities. The National Lottery has changed all that. I see it as the greatest social change legacy since the Clean Air Act. I always say to John Major about legacy - your old boss has the Good Friday Agreement, John Major need look no further than the lottery. It changed the face of arts, culture, sport. Had we not done that, we would not have got the Games. How do you feel about the challenge ahead?
The IAAF does not have a great reputation We are sitting waiting for two independent inquiries, one about individuals within my sport, and a broader-based one about the fragilities around some international testing systems and we know the countries where the issues are being made.
The risk is we will get two meaty issues conflated. The issue I took with the media [is that] they were trying to construct the idea that we at best sat on our hands and at worst we've been complicit in some massive cover-up, and we haven't. There is an ethics committee inquiry into the conduct of certain individuals, but there is nothing in the history of my sport or the IAAF that says we've been sitting there doing nothing. Why have we been collecting blood and urine samples since ?
First of all, what information? And secondly, he himself said that the blood passport cannot be interpreted on one or two readings. The clue is the word "longitudinal" - you could wake up with an elevated white- blood-cell count, I would not immediately say you have leukaemia.
He himself said you cannot extrapolate too much. This must not become a McCarthy-esque witch-hunt. Also, he would not have known whether any of the findings had been followed up. So every time a reading is elevated, you are saying we put it into the public domain, with all the potential damage to the reputation of an athlete, when two days later the reading goes back? They may have been training at altitude, dehydrated after a half marathon - there are all sorts of factors to take into account.
We have shipped a lot of reputational damage by chasing people out of my sport. It would have been easier to have turned a Nelsonian eye. Remember, we test more than any other sport.
We test every discipline. And at the world championships in and , every athlete had blood taken. No other sport can say that. But you are saying take the blood, do the tests, but then don't make the judgement. It is complicated; it doesn't fit easily into a few columns. There are two things here: testing and profiling. The blood passport is a way of profiling.
The second an athlete gets into senior ranks, we start profiling. You have blood, urine - we will go OK, normal, normal, normal, then something goes up, so let's watch this, that could go elevated over a period of time, so then we get suspicious, then do target testing.
It's not as simple as saying here is one test and it is all crystal clear. Yes, and I want to want to make it more independent.
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