Coe promises change after commission report

By Karolos Grohmann MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) - Sebastian Coe accepts that the IAAF Council, of which he was a long-standing member, should have been aware of corruption at the top of athletics' governing body but told Reuters he would introduce reforms to ensure no repeat. Coe came out relatively unscathed from the second part of an independent commission of the World Anti-Doping Agency's (WADA) report on doping and corruption in athletics on Thursday. Co-author Dick Pound said he did not think the Briton had lied about what he knew and that he was the best man to reform the sport. Pound did implicitly criticise him, however, when he said he thought it unlikely that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Council could have been unaware of the scale of the problem. "Yes the Council should have been more aware. Were they in a position to know more? No," Coe said following the news conference in Munich. "I will put systems in place for the current council and so that my successor is never in a position that we don’t understand the nature of the day-to-day running of the organisation. "Yes I was (seven years as IAAF vice-president) and that is the weakness of sport," Coe added. "Sport is not always a properly regulated business. We need more governance in place and I will put it in place so future presidents and future councils have proper accountability and can challenge and be challenged." Lamine Diack, who Coe succeeded as IAAF president last August, was described in the WADA report as running a corrupt, sub-section of the governing body to enable him to extort athletes and cover up doping tests. He has denied any wrongdoing. Coe has already taken steps to reform the organisation's governance and ethics operations. "The public, athletes, sponsors and media will ultimately judge us on the changes that we make," he told Reuters. "We will absorb everything that has been identified as weakness within my organisation straight away. "We can't beg for their trust, we have to earn it, and we should not be in denial about that. This is a long journey -- we can make the changes, and we can make those changes quickly, but the cultural embedment will take some time." (Writing by Mitch Phillips in London; Editing by Catherine Evans)