The International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) has escaped the kind of scholarly attention that has been given to the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This is surprising because, as Jörg Krieger discusses in this monograph, elements of the organizational histories of the IOC and the IAAF overlap. Nonetheless, Krieger has now rectified this historiographical gap. The picture is not always a pretty one, and without Kreiger's work we may never have seen it at all. As the author discusses in the introduction, the IAAF was tetchy about offering access to its archives in the first place.
Krieger's thesis is that the IAAF has been autocratically controlled on behalf of its presidents and that the long arm of history reaches well into the twenty-first century. IAAF presidents’ pronouncements on gender, race, “fair play,” politics, and international relations have been taken as received wisdom, irrespective...
