One 'final' too many?
September 20th 2007 15:26
To be eligible for an invitation this weekend an athlete has to be in the top 7 of the order of merit, in real terms having won or placed highly in at least 3 IAAF Grand Prix events.
Now in this there is an inherent problem – Tyson Gay, the American 100m world champion is only ranked 11th in the standings so won’t be attending the event this weekend.
That’s one big star falling foul of the rules.
Another is Jeremy Wariner who has decided to decline his entry and it’s really not that surprising when you break it all down.
On offer to the winner of each event is $30,000 not bad for one race you might think but compare that to the $500,000 that Sanya Richards and Yelena Isinbaeva picked up last week for winning the Golden League and it pales by comparison for many athletes tired and jaded from an overly long season.
You see the world athletics final loses out to other events – like the world championships, Olympics, golden league etc in all sorts of ways.
For a start the money isn’t nearly enough to attract the biggest stars, had it not been for the rule that to be eligible for their half a million dollar winnings both Richards and Isinbaeva MUST attend this weekend’s showpiece finale their participation may well have been as doubtful as Wariner’s.
Another is the lack of exposure that affects many of the athletics meets that make up the World Athletics Tour (WAT) and that culminate in this weekend’s 2 day event.
Very few meets are televised by major broadcasters – for example the BBC showed the major championships, national championships and the 3 Grand Prix events in this country.
However for a UK based athletics fan the only option open to them if they wanted to watch this years Golden League was to subscribe to a small satellite channel called ‘Setanta Sports’ or if they wanted to take in any other meet pray that it was screened on ‘Eurosport’.
Fairly pathetic really when you think how much Football, Rugby, Cricket, Horse racing is on television these days.
In the last 2 meetings, in Berlin and Brussels the attendances were 70,000 and 45,000 respectively so we know that there is a large demand for the sport and that it can attract a large following.
But that’s a story for another day.
The third and last problem I have with the World Athletics Final is that it isn’t really the final of anything.
After this weekend there are still meetings in Shanghai, Yokohama and Deagu among others which just adds to the pointlessness of the event.
The IAAF really need to take the next few months to come up with a distinct calendar of events that the public can follow that actually amount to something and create a demand for an event that at the moment seems tacked on and superfluous.
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