MONACO: Sebastian Coe declared an “historic” new dawn for the scandal-wounded governing body of track and field after its members on Saturday overwhelmingly backed his package of broad changes to the way it operates and polices doping.

The IAAF president’s “Time for Change” reforms won 95 percent support from 192 countries that cast valid votes at a special congress and vociferous backing from some of the sport’s biggest names.

The launching of a new, largely independent unit to fight doping, broader vetting of IAAF officials and a greater say for women and athletes won’t immediately repair the scorching reputational damage done by revelations of doping cover-ups and alleged IAAF corruption under Coe’s predecessor, Lamine Diack.

French prosecutors working to unpick webs of alleged pay-offs for IAAF protection of athletes who were doping are still gathering evidence, with Russia now cooperating, so there could still be more dark headlines for Coe to deal with.

Still, comfortable passage of reforms championed by the middle-distance former Olympic champion and the recognition voiced by athletics officials that they and their sport risked being marginalized if they rejected change do put increasing daylight between the Diack and Coe eras.

“This is a good and historic day for our sport,” Coe said after Congress members voted 182 to 10 in favour of the reforms.

“This is a ringing endorsement of our commitment to do things differently,” Coe told a news conference. “We now have structures, frameworks and foundations that will create a safety net.”

While some federation members bristled at the open nature of the vote, with results published for all to see, Coe was defiant.

“We’ve moved into the world of transparency,” was the Briton’s blunt reply when quizzed on why he had not opted to make the ballot a secret one.

“Transparency sits at the heart of everything we’ve been talking about it. That is a key word and everyone knows what it means.”

Coe’s presidency was almost immediately plunged into crisis after he took over from Diack in August 2015.

He reminded the congress that police officers raided IAAF offices, seizing files, when he was just settling in.

He noted that recent additional “grotesque” allegations of wrongdoing under Diack spoke of “extraordinary sums of money allegedly changing hands”.

“You should all feel violated,” Coe said. “This is money that could have been used for the development of athletics.”

Warning that “we cannot let this happen again,” Coe said too much power had been concentrated in too few hands under Diack, now facing corruption and money-laundering charges in France.

He said the reforms will ensure that “never again can one person wield unchecked power,” and are required for the multi-million dollar business that athletics has become.

“We’re putting in place a framework that should have been there years ago,” he said.

Portions of the restructuring will become effective in 2017, including the launching of an integrity unit and a disciplinary panel, with others changes set for 2019.

Coe hailed the “painstaking” work of his team that has spent six months criss-crossing the globe to debate the package with member federations and establish what he dubbed the “exemplar of best practice”.

“I hope the public perception of our sport actually is helped by what they’ve seen, but that wasn’t primarily why we did it,” the former British parliamentarian and two-time Olympic 1500m gold medallist said.

“We did it because we were in need of change, we did it because we had to do it in haste and I make no apology for that.

“There’s a lot in there that will make us safer and make us safer a lot more quickly than it would have done had we not put those things in place.”

Published in Dawn, December 5th, 2016