Just a couple of weeks after describing the latest revelations about the extent of doping in athletics as “a declaration of war” upon his sport, Seb Coe has been elected to another highly influential post.

In light of what we have seen in cycling, his comments seemed a bizarre way to interpret allegations that doping in athletics has been happening on an industrial scale, but it clearly played well with those entitled to vote for the IAAF presidency.

We know what the majority of influential people in athletics think about his stance, then, but what of the rest of us.

Once issues of such magnitude have been raised it is the most natural thing in the world to be curious about how things are inter-connected.

It is natural to wonder whether a high level sportsman is competing clean when many compatriots are found not to have been doing so.

It is natural to wonder why the first reaction of a contemporary would be to say of someone accused of involvement in doping that they expect them to be able to defend themselves, rather than merely acknowledging that there is a case to answer.

It is natural to wonder about the motivation of someone banned for repeatedly missing dope tests when they jump to the defence of others who have subsequently done likewise, rather than noting that they should have learned from their sorry example.

Unfortunately, too often, our enthusiasm for demanding scrutiny of such matters seems to be affected by proximity to the subject and I recall one sports journalist who would regularly defend Scottish sportspeople accused of doping, but would celebrate the conviction of foreigners he had had held under suspicion.

More recently, at a golf event, a four-way discussion over an evening beer saw four of us split evenly in arguing about the likelihood of golfers using performance enhancing drugs.

I was a bit shocked when, as our side was dissecting the dubious contention that no drugs would help golfers, a long-respected colleague intervened with what I now think of as the Lance Armstrong defence in saying we could not hold the view that golfers might cheat until we have the evidence.

In one of those strange quirks of fate it emerged the following morning that an American golfer had been banned overnight after admitting to taking drugs that were on the banned list.

Questions were subsequently raised and rather unsatisfactorily answered among his fellow US pros about the rigour of the testing regime that had failed to pick up his offence, which was only identified when Scott Stallings, the player in question, realised his own mistake.

All of this is informed by the knowledge that those with most to lose are the sports themselves.

Far too much evidence has emerged in recent years to allow us to remain in denial about the lengths a significant proportion of people who are highly competitive by nature – even before all the other incentives of modern professional sport are factored in – are prepared to go to.

By way of demonstrating that, it was in the same year as the London Olympics that Scottish sports writer Richard Moore published his excellent book “The Dirtiest Race in History” outlining how, if Olympic medals were withdrawn from those who failed drug tests at some point in their careers, only two medals would have been awarded in the 100 metres at the 1988 Games.

Yet within that book Moore makes the observation that some take “a more ambiguous, even ambivalent view.

“It was the greatest race of all time they say. And perhaps it was.”

Therein lies the conundrum. Is the biggest problem facing the sport the scale of the doping or its exposure?

It is certainly an easier solution to demonise a Ben Johnson or, indeed, a Lance Armstrong, than it is to acknowledge that the problem is endemic.

Coe’s election to his new post, meanwhile, comes in the same month that the UK confirmed that – his team having built the campaign to host the Olympics in London on the impact it would have on the country’s youth – sports participation figures have fallen since 2012.

The equivalent argument to describing the 1988 final as the greatest race of all time might be to note that the UK staged the greatest sporting show on earth and, like Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games, it was a great party, so we should just enjoy that for its own sake and forget all about promises of "legacy".

Coe has, then, proved himself an astute politician who knows just what to say in order to persuade those doing the voting that he is their man.

In this instance, however, that announcement of “a declaration of war” on his sport was all too easily interpreted as saying that it is not so much those who are doping who are damaging his sport as those who are applying pressure to expose the extent of the problem.

Perhaps his message was merely a politician’s means to an end of course and he will now use his office to pursue, relentlessly, those who are truly undermining its credibility.

As unscrupulous as that would be in its own right it would probably be the lesser of two evils for the sport of athletics.