IAAF struggle to get athletics back on track

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IAAF struggle to get athletics back on track
By Mihir Bose
(Filed: 03/11/2005)


The problems besetting world athletics will be at the top of the agenda during a meeting of the sport's ruling body in Moscow.



There is growing unrest within the ranks of the International Association of Athletics Federations about the way things are being organised and the association's failure to market the sport in the United States. The issues will be central to the IAAF council's meeting over the weekend of Nov 12 and 13.

Luciano Barra, the chief operating officer of next year's Turin Winter Olympics who for many years was the right-hand man of Primo Nebiolo, the former IAAF president, said: "Nebiolo made the sport and nobody has been able to pick up his mantle."

Barra accepts that the IAAF World Championships are highly successful, but at Helsinki, despite a wonderful showing by the United States, the event hardly registered on American television screens. Barra said that however good the World Championships were, they represented only a small percentage of activity in the sport. "It is like drinking a glass of good wine only five days a year and thinking you are a wine expert," he said.

Last year, in a 16-page paper on the problems of athletics submitted to the IAAF, Barra concluded: "With the exception of the World Championships the format of athletics competition is not understandable to the large part of the public.

Most sports have a simple formula, or at least the separate elements which make up a sport such as tennis seem to be able to lay out their different events. The World Cup and the World Athletics Final make no sense. It is crazy to have a World Athletics Final [for individual athletes] only a few weeks after the World Championships. The two are not compatible and confuse the public."

Barra added: "The Golden League, as a concept, means nothing. Zurich and Brussels have value on their own. The public is bored. This needs a radical change with a new format." The situation is such that in Germany, biathlon attracts bigger audiences than athletics.

Barra said this week: "Our major problem is the one-day international meetings. There could be 25 athletes running in a race and 10 of them are Kenyans. Can you recognise 10 Kenyans in one competition? Then there is the whole business of pacemaking. People are trying to break records. I would stop pacemaking at the one-day events. Make it more human. Apart from Britain, where one-day events are well organised and they know their athletics spectators, public interest in one-day meetings is non-existent."

There are also concerns that most of the IAAF sponsors are Japanese, and may not continue their backing after the 2007 World Athletics Championships in Osaka.

Highly-placed IAAF sources say that all this is putting pressure on the president, Lamine Diack, who succeeded Nebiolo. Diack may face a challenge from the wealthy Greek, Minos Xen Kyriakou, who is on the IAAF council, when he seeks re-election in 2007.

The IAAF council will also be considering in Moscow how to do deal with African athletes who are turning up at events with Qatari passports. This not only threatens to devalue the events, but also risks alienating limited public support.