OpEd: Surprising, Captivating IAAF Championships Revive Athletics

Written in London by Michael Pirrie

While happiness can be an elusive and fleeting experience, Londoners and visitors from across the world seem to have found some happiness again back at the Olympic Stadium, returning to the scene of those fabled London 2012 Olympic Games, like time travelers seeking to reconnect with special moments, memories and places from the past.

All roads, tube lines and flight paths across the capital, Europe and beyond led back to Stratford, with athletics at the cross roads following a series of doping and corruption scandals and in need of some sporting salvation and redemption.

There was no Dr. Who waiting at the local phone booth or Captain Kirk on the landing deck to greet the Olympic time travelers. This was another time if not place, different but still familiar enough on arrival to feel something special was about to happen. The experience beginning again with teams of friendly, energetic and well informed volunteers who welcomed fans from across the UK and the world back to the future of their sports.

New Age of Athletics

The London 2017 championships went against conventions and expectations that athletics was declining further in international reach and appeal, providing a lifeline to one of the world’s oldest and most important sports.

This was athletics like never before, on giant video screens and boards that created a concert-like atmosphere inside the London Olympic stadium. It had been modified to bring action and athletes closer than ever before in a venue that many experts consider the best in the world.

This was not traditional stadium sport and the fans loved what they saw on the field, track and massive video screens - a new and cleverly choreographed sports entertainment experience as the routine ‘Call Up’ room for the athletes became the new "green room" of sport.

Athletes were welcomed into the stadium track by announcers, fireworks, plumes of flame and booming applause as if entering a new giant outdoor sports variety TV show called ‘The World’s Got Talent'. One almost expected Robbie Williams to appear with a rendition of ‘Let Me Entertain You‘ and Simon Cowell to hand out some medals!

Instead it was the athletes who did all the entertaining in partnership with the crowds. This was not Premier League football but it was premier sport.

London 2017 produced electrifying sport and athletes, and showed that sport is still one of the most inclusive and unifying forms of human expression and activity on the planet.

The human opera that surrounds elite sport in the pursuit of life defining dreams, London 2017 was a spectacular symphony of sport and the human spirit, with uplifting displays of excellence and grace under enormous pressure, expectation and often extreme adversity, as if conjured from a sports science fiction story.

These real-life scripts included performances of high speed movement, endurance, strength, bravery, resilience and daring in imagination.

London 2017 resembled a live, non-stop sports action-drama movie full of twists and turns that rivaled the giant pretzel shaped Orbit structure that overlooked the London stadium.

Some of the plots seemed too extreme to believe possible like the hero of the championships Usain Bolt, an athlete so singularly gifted that he seemed to come from a galaxy far away, collapsed on the track in his last race, resembling David Bowie’s Man Who Fell To Earth.

Another athlete defied illness and the system to qualify and reach the finals of the demanding 200 meters sprint, while an unheralded American college student beat the world’s fastest man.

London 2017 made for compelling viewing on television and constant conversation on YouTube, Twitter, on the buses, at tube stations, in restaurants, homes, offices, playgrounds, and building sites across the capital. International centers welcomed fans as the home and competing nations celebrated their athletes and their stories that went beyond lap times, splits, heights and distances and captivated and engaged audiences worldwide.

Like Australian Sally Pearson, an athlete who returned to the London stadium after recovering from almost career ending injuries and repeated history when she won the 100 meters hurdles - the same event she won five years earlier at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Perhaps the spirit of legendary Australian Olympic sprinting icon Betty Cuthbert, who passed away earlier in the championships, guided Pearson over the hurdles in a technically faultless performance that inspired the London crowds and her home nation halfway across the world, highlighting sport’s unique capacity to move and unite people and places.

Crowded House

If athletics is in crisis, the crowds told another story. On the opening weekend of England’s Premier League season, the IAAF championships drew the biggest crowds in football obsessed London.

This followed more than a week of sold out sessions in the 60,000 capacity stadium, totaling 700,000 paid for tickets, almost unparalleled for any recent major sporting event anywhere in the world. Athletics was back in the game.

If these championships were about the future – with implications for the Olympic Movement where athletics is the premier sport - they were also an event for and of our times.

With the world on a rhetorical war footing, the star of the London show, Usain Bolt, was a human missile of speed and force for goodwill, as were fellow athletes. This was a sporting event with messages and values added that transcended sport and spoke to wider issues of our times.

In the growing "Country First’’ culture of rising nationalism, the London stadium crowds roared unconditional support and love for athletes competing from around the globe, and for countries as diverse as Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Congo and Syria, demonstrating the power of sport to break down barriers.

And in a period of changing immigration patterns and policies that have displaced millions of people, the athlete who had the biggest impact on these championships was a refugee from Somalia, now one of the greatest Olympic and world champion distance runners of all time - Sir Mo Farah, who was separated from his twin brother in the escape to London as a child.

In additional to piercing crowd noise, the soundtrack to the championships included constant jeering of American sprinter Justin Gatlin, and not just because he beat Bolt in his 100 meters showpiece, but because Gatlin previously served a suspension for doping.

The Values of Sport

While Bolt graciously defended Gatlin’s right to compete because he had served his penalty, the Gatlin backlash and crowd protests highlighted inconvenient truths about doping beyond Russia in other nations, signalling a hardening of public attitudes against doping across sports.

Coe knows that public trust arrives on foot but can often leave quickly in a taxi. The leadership he has shown as new IAAF president in pushing for the temporary suspension of Russian athletes from international competition, including last year’s Rio Games, has helped to revive trust in athletics again.

The ban, supported by WADA, was described by IOC president Thomas Bach at the start of these IAAF championships in London as "courageous,’’ and has shown Coe and his IAAF Council colleagues to be on the right side of history after Russia’s athletics leader recently apologized for the first time for the doping scandal portrayed in the McLaren report, despite numerous previous denials from Russian authorities.

With a new anti-doping team and strategy in place in Russia to stop elaborate and extensive doping programs from resurfacing and new IAAF independent testing and integrity unit protocols and procedures, there is a new found sense of hope and optimism that the war on doping is turning in favor of clean athletes more than ever.

Thank You and Goodbye - A World Without Bolt

While the London 2012 Olympic Games may have revived the host nation’s belief in itself, the organizers of the London 2017 World Athletic Championships hope that the event has started to restore belief and confidence in the sport again.

Coe’s rescue and reform of the sport that has been at the center of his life since childhood, much like Bolt, remain literally on track and are being closely followed by other world governing bodies also seeking ways to maintain the reach and relevance of their sports in our rapidly changing global society.

The IAAF will need to find new ways to build on Bolt’s triumphs and turn the best athletes into new stars of the future who can relate and communicate in ways that are meaningful to the lives of youths.

It will also need to continue to innovate and adapt the event-heavy athletics schedules to get athletes closer and more accessible to spectators in the venues, on social media and in urban settings.

London organizers were highly fortunate to have Bolt, and selling tickets will be a lot harder without him in Doha as Qatar prepares to host the next edition of the championships.

The London experience has provided the momentum for Coe’s sporting revolution to continue and develop on stronger foundations without Bolt, who hopes to continue working with Coe to revive the sport that has been so central to both their lives.

For nearly a decade, Bolt has thrilled the planet with his superhuman speed, encouraging the world to think big and do great things. He provided a reassuring presence in the lives of millions.

As Bolt departs, the only question that remains is when - or if - we will ever see the likes of such a singularly gifted athlete again. While Muhammad Ali may always be regarded as the greatest, Bolt will be the fastest.

Bolt has moved at the speed of sound in human terms, but he may not be able to outrun the worldwide applause and ovations that might never be accorded to another athlete.

Michael Pirrie is a London-based international communications and media adviser on major events and world sport. Michael was international media relations adviser for London’s bid for the 2017 IAAF World Athletic Championships and executive adviser to London 2012 Olympic Games chairman Sebastian Coe, leading the international media campaign against Paris, New York, Moscow and Madrid.

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