At 88, Lamine Diack bowed out in his native Senegal. President of the International Athletics Federation (IAAF) between 1999 and 2015, he was indicted in November 2015 by the French justice for passive corruption and aggravated money laundering in a doping case involving Russian athletes.
Found guilty, Lamine Diack was sentenced in September 2020 to four years in prison, two of which were closed. The former Senegalese Minister of Sports had appealed against his conviction.
Returned to Senegal last May
Last May, following the lifting of the ban on leaving French territory to which he was subject, he returned to Senegal after having paid a deposit of 500,000 euros in the context of a second pending legal case. The Dakar Jaraaf, a football club of which he was the president on two occasions, in the 1970s and 2000s, had collected the sum. Lamine Diack had appealed against this conviction and the date of a new trial remained to be fixed.
Previously, a collection had been launched by a collective formed for his return since his arrest in France and the Jaraaf had decided not to wait for the end of this decision to allow him to return to his family. He had not returned to his country since 2015.
” Yes, my father has just been called to God. We would have liked him to continue accompanying us, but he bowed out. Divine decree, no one can escape it “, Confirmed his son, Pape Massata Diack, former marketing advisor to the IAAF, who was also tried in Paris for corruption and organized money laundering in this affair.
Lamine Diack globalized the first Olympic sport
The indictment in another case, still not tried, had, at first, prevented Lamine Diack from returning to Senegal. He had had his passport confiscated as part of the judicial review imposed by the judges.
In this second case, Mr. Diack had been indicted since March 27, 2019, still for corruption, within the framework of the attributions of the Olympic Games 2016 in Rio and 2020 in Tokyo, but also in the processes of attribution of the Worlds of Beijing athletics in 2015, then the 2017 and 2019 Worlds, for which Qatar was a candidate.
Despite the terrible ball of corruption, Lamine Diack could boast of having globalized the first Olympic sport. From an accounting standpoint, television and sponsorship thus amounted, in fifteen years, to more than one billion euros. A legacy swept away by business, which caused the loss of important sponsors to the international federation.
A sports enthusiast
Born in 1933, Lamine Diack has always been passionate about sports. Young, he had played football, athletics, volleyball and basketball. Later, in 1958, Lamine Diack became the French long jump champion before obtaining a diploma from the National Tax School in Paris in addition to a license in public law. Once back in Senegal, he became an inspector of taxes and areas in the administration.
From 1964 to 1968, Lamine Diack was appointed national technical director of Senegalese football. Ten years later, entering politics, he was elected mayor of Dakar from 1978 to 1980.
At the same time, he built his career in the world of sport. After the presidency of the African Athletics Confederation from 1973, he joined the National Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1974, before chairing it from 1985 to 2002. In 1987, he became vice-president of the IAAF and, in 1991, he was its first vice-president. It was in 1999 that he took the helm of the International Athletics Federation after the death of Primo Nebiolo. After his indictment by the French courts, he resigned from his post as honorary member of the IOC.
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