POSTED: December 1st 2010

NewsUpdate

NEIL WILSON; Different worlds, different prices, different ambitions

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

LONDON, Dec 01: Pierre Weiss, general-secretary of the IAAF, is happy for you to know the budget for the 2007 world athletics championships in Osaka, the last to be hosted in Asia. It was $80m, half of which came from the city itself, he informed a briefing of journalists after the last council meeting.

What he declined to reveal was the budget for the next in Asia, in Daegu, South Korea, next August. No, it was not that it was commercially sensitive information, the usual reason for reticence among bureaucrats. Nor that it had yet to be finalised.

The reason for Weiss’s reluctance, as he joked, was the size of it. “It is too big. It would scare away other potential bidders,” he said.

I can reveal exactly what the Daegu budget is because it was the talk of officials there who were let into the secret.  It is a staggering $190m. And it plans to spends millions on an opening ceremony.

While not confirming the top figure, Weiss explains: “There is a difference in cultures, Asia to Europe. Asia has a lot more costs.”

The greatest of those, of course, is what the Americans call “papering the house”, the distribution of cheap or free tickets to the public to cover for the fact that there is no interest in the area in buying tickets.

The interest in track and field does not extend much beyond the ambitions for self-aggrandisement of local politicians. So ticket receipts which account for vast portions of the budget of European events – close to a third for the organisers of the 2012 Olympic Games in London - are an insignificant factor in Asia.

In 2006 I was in Nanjing for China’s National Games, its quadrennial national Olympics. Its bizarrely-named 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium was virtually empty for all sessions except those featuring China’s hero hurdler Lui Xiang. Even on the days he competed it largely emptied as soon as he had run. Interest was in celebrity, not in the sport.

“There is no culture for spectator sports in China,” I was told locally.

Nor in Deagu, founding home of IAAF sponsor Samsung. The Daegu Stadium, built at a cost of $265m for the 2002 World Cup, has 68,000 seats but its tenant, a K-League professional soccer team, has never averaged five figures in any season in its existence and the stadium has not hosted another major sports event since 2002.

The 2011 world athletic championships are going there – and the 2015 version to Beijing where they have volunteered to double prize money to $7.5m – because the IAAF want to spread the gospel of track and field to Asia. And a time when old Europe does not have two euros to rub together and developing Asia has money to burn is a good time.

Quite why local politicos in Daegu think spending so much is a good idea at any time is beyond me. But then Weiss told another story of Istanbul offering a stadium built for the world basketball championships for a future world indoor athletics championships.

“Sorry but it’s too small,” said the IAAF. “No problem,” said the local Minister responsible. “We’ll build another behind it.”

When it comes to burnishing their own egos, politicians top the world rankings.

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  

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