Usain Bolt resisted the challenge of the world’s fastest man this year, Justin Gatlin, to retain his world 100 metres title here tonight in what he described as his “hardest race.”

Mo Farah won his sixth consecutive global title here tonight to lay claim to being Britain’s best ever championship performer.

Thomas Bach held out hope to Allyson Felix today that she might yet be able to realise her ambition of challenging for both the 200 and 400m titles at next year’s Rio Olympics.

Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), recalled his days as an Olympic athlete representative with Sebastian Coe here today as he said he was “absolutely sure” that, under the Briton's impending Presidency of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the two organisations would work “very, very closely together” to eradicate doping.

Usain Bolt has admitted he found the recent controversies about doping in the sport depressing - but has resisted the idea that he has sole responsibility for rescuing its reputation by winning clean in the Chinese capital against a field including the doubly sanctioned Justin Gatlin.

The Sunday Times today reported that a study conducted among 1,800 competitors at the 2011 World Athletics Championships in Daegu indicated that 29 to 34 per cent had violated anti-doping rules in the previous 12 months, and added that the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had sought to block its publication.

Elvan Abeylegesse stands to lose two Olympic silver medals, and one from the World Championships, after being officially named by the Turkish Athletics Federation as one of the 28 athletes for whom adverse findings were revealed by the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF) recent re-testing of samples from the 2005 and 2007 World Championships.

Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford has said that not having the Union flag on his Team GB kit for the forthcoming World Championships in Beijing is a “terrible choice". 

“Cutting edge” technology has enabled the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) to identify adverse findings from 28 athletes after the re-testing of stored urine samples from the 2005 and 2007 World Championships in Helsinki and Osaka respectively. 

Three years after her last competitive international race - in which she won the London 2012 women’s double sculls title with Katherine Grainger - Britain's Anna Watkins has announced that she is back in training and aiming for the Rio 2016 Games.

Germany’s Olympic discus champion Robert Harting, who led a group of athletes posting a YouTube message saying the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) had “betrayed” them by failing to combat doping in the sport, has been invited by the sport’s world governing body to visit their headquarters in Monte Carlo and see for himself the work they are doing.

London Marathon chief executive Nick Bitel has said he is “very concerned” by the latest doping allegations published by the Sunday Times, which claims seven London winners in a 12-year period recorded suspicious blood scores, and he criticised the International Association of Athletics Federations’ (IAAF) “failure to take effective action”.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has challenged what it describes as “a number of seriously incorrect assertions” by the two scientists who worked on the recent ARD television documentary alleging widespread doping malpractice in the sport between 2001 and 2012, and has condemned them for placing athletes under media pressure through their “analysis of incomplete data". 

The latest doping allegations over athletics, levelled by German TV broadcaster ARD and Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper, will be “urgently” investigated by the Independent Commission already set-up by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) - a move the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) claimed it “warmly welcomes".