IAAF World Championships end on a drier note, but the Olympic Stadium comes up short

Organisers facing overall loss after ticket sales fail to meet targets

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The TV-newscaster's closing remarks late on Sunday evening were telling: "So now the World Championships are done, and it looks like the weather prospects are cheering up."
      It summed matters up perfectly. The 10th IAAF World Championships in Athletics, celebrated in Helsinki for the past week, have not exactly been blessed with sunny skies. Torrential rain, high winds, and lightning pyrotechnics even caused a two-hour complete stoppage last Tuesday, and it has been calculated that the average rainfall for the entire month of August fell on Helsinki in the space of a couple of days. Tuesday evening alone saw an inch of water dumped on the poor, bedraggled souls in the Olympic Stadium.
     
Even if the weather was inclement, and even if Finnish athletics fans had a long wait for something to really cheer about, they proved themselves to be a hardy, intelligent, and very supportive crowd.
      Their stoicism in the rain and fairness towards all competitors regardless of country (including the auld enemy Sweden) was duly noted by the IAAF President Lamine Diack, who insisted that the Olympic Stadium crowds ought to get a gold medal of their own.
      The support and enthusiasm did not go unnoticed by the athletes, either. Many of the winners making their lap of honour carried a Finnish flag along with their own.
     
So far, things have been fairly quiet on the doping front, but this may change, as late on Sunday night the IAAF announced a positive test result but have not yet named the athlete concerned or the drug found.
      One Indian female discus thrower tested positive late last week for the banned drug Pemoline, but she was not among the medallists nor even a finalist in her event.
      The two Czech decathletes, Olympic champion and Helsinki silver medallist Roman Sebrle and former world champion Tomas Dvorak, will apparently not face IAAF sanctions for receiving an intravenous infusion while the competition was still in progress.
      They both passed drug tests and the glucose infusion was not deemed to have transgressed competition rules as it was given "as a legitimate acute medical treatment". It remains to be seen whether WADA, the anti-doping body, will content themselves with this resolution, as they believe any form of assistance such as this is tantamount to doping or at least unsporting behaviour.
      A total of around 850 doping tests were carried out on athletes in Helsinki.
     
The weather this past week was not perhaps within the organisers' control, but one obvious fact emerged from these games: the beloved and attractive Olympic Stadium from the 1930s is seriously showing its age, and is woefully ill-equipped to cope with the demands of a 21st century international athletics meet on this scale.
      Not only is the 30,000-seater venue undersized, especially when several thousand seats are taken by the press and VIPs, but the lack of a roof over all the stands renders it uncomfortably vulnerable to the elements, and the very shape of the arena aggravates the perennial problem of swirling winds. There were a number of incidents in which competitors were not on a level playing-field owing to wildly fluctuating wind conditions, most noticeably in the heats for the men's 200 metres.
     
Equally, the facilities for the media and spectators alike do not come up to requirements today. Sport has moved a long way towards mass-media entertainment from the innocent days of the 1952 Olympics, or even from 1983 and the inaugural World Championships held here.
      Ilkka Kanerva, Chairman of the Organizing Committee, was unsparing in his remarks, commenting acidly that arranging the games in the venue was like trying to force a size 12 foot into a size 8 shoe.
      The truth of the matter is that Helsinki would never have been able to host the 10th World Championships were it not for London's abrupt withdrawal on the grounds that they could not build a stadium in time. The Finns and Helsinki stepped up to the plate, much to the relief of the IAAF, who knew that they were a safe pair of hands, and also that security considerations would probably not pose a major problem hereabouts.
      The games organisers were given a very tight schedule to put on the championships, but by the same token they were not expected to perform miracles and build a 70,000-seat arena with state of the art facilities. It is very unlikely we shall ever see an event of this size in the stadium again. And yet few sane politicians would dare suggest constructing a new, larger sports stadium in a city the size of Helsinki.
     
Another complaint voiced widely concerned the price of the tickets. Here again, the size of the Olympic Stadium was a factor: with a EUR 30 million budget to be balanced, and only 25,000 tickets to sell each day, something had to give.
      As it was, many advance buyers were put off by the thought of prices from EUR 59 to EUR 300, and those who might have come on the day stayed at home after the Finns underperformed on the track and field and the weather-gods overperformed upstairs.
      Wednesday night was a sell-out, but then again that was men's javelin night. On other days, TV viewers could see empty spaces in all sections of the stadium.
      It is likely that the games will produce a loss for the organisers. The government has promised to guarantee losses up to EUR 3 million, but it is hoped that the numbers in red ink will not be quite that large.
     

In any case, the games will have brought in a great deal more indirectly in terms of tourism revenue and image-building (though the weather did its best to ruin that).
      The international Finnish reputation for being able to organise things smoothly and summon up massive numbers of unpaid volunteers came through the last ten days more or less intact.
      And the tight security paid off, with no unseemly incidents to mar the event, except a bomb hoax at the harbours on the very first day.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Suspicions surround Czech decathletes at IAAF World Championships (12.8.2005)

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