In the world of Olympic sports, Dick Pound, the former chief of the World Anti-Doping Agency, is known as a straight talker who has no tolerance for corruption or doping.
After all, he’s the one who, after the cyclist Floyd Landis failed a drug test in 2006 with an insanely high ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone, said: “You’d think he’d be violating every virgin within 100 miles. How does he even get on a bicycle?”
Yet on Thursday, when Pound spoke at a news conference in Munich about the report he wrote for WADA regarding corruption and possible criminal behavior at the top levels of the International Association of Athletics Federations — the world’s governing body of track and field — he did not wield his verbal sword against the sport’s officials who he said helped facilitate systematic doping in Russia.