SWITCHING OFF
Paris meet reflects lack of interest as well as talent in Europe, says Steven Downes
YOU COULD be forgiven if you missed it. On one of the year’s busiest sporting weekends, the international track season tried to make itself heard in Paris on Friday with the latest stage in the six-meeting Golden League series.
The Golden League offers the biggest cash prize in athletics, a share of $1 million to any competitor in select events who can go unbeaten through the summer.
Maybe $1m is not what it once was. The Paris Grand Prix attracted barely a ripple of interest in this country. Nor, indeed, anywhere else in Europe, for the sport of athletics is losing a long-term battle.
Gone are the days when the BBC would interrupt the Nine O’Clock News to show Seb Coe or Steve Ovett’s latest world record attempt from Oslo or Zurich. These top meetings have not enjoyed terrestrial television exposure in Britain this decade, and last year Sky opted to drop its coverage.
Next month though, the BBC, unfailingly loyal to Britain’s brave battlers, will offer wall-to-wall coverage of the World Championships in Osaka.
But the medal pickings there are going to be thin if form in Paris is anything to go by. Tim Benjamin was well beaten in the men’s 400 metres, tailing off in seventh, nearly two seconds adrift of LaShawn Merritt. And Merritt is not even the American champion.
If fans ran the risk of getting carried away with the performances of Britain’s women in winning the second division of the European Cup last month, they will have been quickly persuaded of the true world order, with Natasha Danvers-Smith, a cup winner, last in the 400m hurdles.
Ireland’s Alistair Cragg demonstrated how difficult the sport now is for Europeans, for despite clocking 7min 40.31sec, the fastest 3000m of this season by someone from this continent, he finished no better than fifth behind a clutch of East Africans.
In fairness to the TV companies, if the athletes do not support the Golden League, then why should they? Of the 10 contenders for the $1m jackpot going into the Paris event, only six bothered to turn up. Among the absentees was Britain’s Phillips Idowu, a late withdrawal from the triple jump due to a “minor injury”.
Athletics in Europe is struggling. Diminishing television interest is just one sign. A lack of world-beaters from the former strongholds of Germany, Italy and Britain is another.
Friday night’s winners list demonstrated this: 10 nations were represented on the victory podium, but only three were from western Europe, with one of them, Frenchman Bob Tahri, claiming the 3000m steeplechase only because the lap counters confused the opposition, who stopped racing a lap before the finish.
In the 1500m the 60,000 crowd in the Stade de France saw home favourite Mehdi Baala outfoxed round the last lap. Ironically, the result may help to regenerate track and field in another territory struggling for coverage: the US. Alan Webb took the Paris 1500m in 3:30.54, the fastest in the world this year.
“I hate to spoil the race for the hometown hero,” Webb said. “It meant a lot to Baala, but it meant a lot to me too.”
The 24-year-old has been carrying the weight of American expectations since he was running sub-four-minute miles as a schoolboy. The win confirms the Virginian as the first world-class American miler since Steve Scott and Sydney Maree in the 1980s. And unlike Scott and Maree, with his event wide open Webb looks to have a chance of winning a title on the global stage.