POSTED: May 18th 2010

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NEIL WILSON: Athletics' Diamond sparkle depends on no more false starts

THE NEIL WILSON COLUMN / An authoritative, exclusive series only from Sports Features Communications

LONDON, May 05: No Usain Bolt when athletics lifted the curtain on its new $50m Diamond League was as remarkable as would be Bafana Bafana skipping the opening match of South Africa’s World Cup or Andrew Lloyd Webber not attending the first night party of Over The Rainbow.

The show was written for him. Or at least around him. The IAAF spent two years planning a Formula One-style world tour of 14 venues in 12 countries to attract its most famous stars and none  more than the Lightning Bolt.

Many in the sport see this as a make or break venture for the sport as a commercial enterprise, a Last Chance Saloon.  Yet the IAAF chose the unlikely venue of Doha in the desert sheikdom of Qatar for its launch, and then did not insist on its leading man taking a role.

Instead the only athlete with 37,000 Twitter followers and more than 4m mentions on Google was packing his bags for his flight to South Korea on his way to making his grand entrance in Shanghai, the League’s second stop. Second, as somebody once said in another context, is nowhere.

Last month in Philadelphia, in a country where track and field was thought to have died when  Marion Jones and Justin Gatlin were caught popping pharmaceutical enhancements, 54,000 Americans turned out to watch the Jamaican run a relay leg. In Doha ticket scalpers would have gone out of business. Two together? You could have had 22 there were so many empty seats.

Commercial significance

The greater commercial importance to his sponsors of China may be good reason to skip opening night but it left a bill topped by Bolt’s compatriot Asafa Powell, an ex-world record holder struggling for credibility among sprinting’s holy trinity with Bolt and Tyson Gay.

Bolt, to his credit, will give the new League his full attention after Shanghai.  His itinerary takes him to New York, Lausanne, Paris, Zurich, Brussels and London but reviews tend to be based on opening night.

Empty seats, empty lanes and three contracted Ambassadors dropping out in the lead up may have left the title sponsor the IAAF promises to announce next month less than enthralled.
First nights should have the audience standing in their seats to demand encores. In Doha the crowd had stood and left by the final act.

It will get better - Powell’s windy 9.75sec suggests he can at least persuade Bolt to put his mind to something impressive – and it needs to. Athletics has fallen behind the curve as competing sports modernise.

The Olympic’s premier sport will not get a second chance after the Bolt phenomenon to regain its place in the leading pack.

NEIL WILSON reported his first Olympic Games in Munich in 1972. He has since covered another nine summer and nine winter Olympics for various newspapers, including The Independent and the Daily Mail with whom he has worked for the last 19 years as Athletics and Olympic correspondent. He was Britain's Sports Journalist of the Year in 1984 and is the author of seven books.

Keywords · Neil Wilson · Bolt · IAAF · Diamond League

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