"Fantastic" Athletics World Championships End

(ATR) The 12th IAAF World Championships in Athletics lived up to its slogan "Have a Good Time!" as the competition concluded Sunday in Berlin.

Not only were there fast performances on the track - led by Jamaican Usain Bolt, who ran record-shattering 9.58 seconds in the 100 and 19.19 in the 200 -- but athletes and spectators also enjoyed themselves.

"This was my favorite World Championships," U.S. 800-meter runner Hazel Clark told Around the Rings. "The people, the set-up, the organization."

"They're fantastic World Championships, and I think that the promises made in Beijing have been kept here in Berlin," said IAAF President Lamine Diack. "Skeptical voices were saying athletics is not in good health, and we have proof (that it is)."

Organizers released figures showing a total of 518,582 spectators at Olympic Stadium over the nine days, plus a generous 1.395 million spectators for the two marathons and three racewalking events on the streets of Berlin.

IAAF General Secretary Pierre Weiss said, "We know the stadium is very big -- 74,064 seats reduced down to 56,000 (after media, VIPS, Mixed Zone, camera positions are taken into account) - and to have it nearly full, way over 90%, on (Aug. 16 for the men's 100 final) we see as a success. Remember in Gothenburg (1995) we had a full stadium every day, but there the capacity was just 30,000, so the size of the venue is a major factor here."

Prior to the final weekend, about 70 percent of available tickets had been sold. Bolt's final appearance in the 4 x 100-meter relay on Saturday brought in a high of 59,926, followed by 50,784 on Sunday.

Alarmed by low ticket sales a few months ago, the IAAF was "tough with the organizers," Diack said. "We were preoccupied by the question whether they would be able to fill the stadium, sell all the tickets, and the situation has improved."

By the Numbers

A total of 1,984 athletes from 201 of the IAAF's 213 member nations competed. That included 1,086 men and 898 women - although the gender of women's 800-meter champion Caster Semenya of South Africa is still to be determined.

The United States won the medal count with 22 medals - 10 gold, six silver and six bronze, followed by Jamaica with seven gold, four silver and two bronze for a total of 13. Although Russia also had 13 medals (four gold, three silver, six bronze), Kenya took third in the medal standings with 11 medals based on its higher number of silvers (four gold, five silver, two bronze).

Host country Germany was sixth in the medal count with nine medals (two gold, three silver, four bronze).

"What has been special here has been the excellent performances of the German team - motivated by the wonderful sporting atmosphere generated by the Berlin spectators," Diack said. "I would like to say a special thanks to them for their good nature, their enthusiasm but especially their sporting attitude, as they were ready to cheer and applause all the athletes, not only Germans!

Athletes from 37 countries won medals and 62 countries had finalists. That is a drop from 2007 in Osaka, Japan, when 46 countries medaled and 73 had finalists.

When Qatar's James Kwalia C'Kurui took third in the men's 5,000 meters, the former Kenyan runner had to take his victory lap empty-handed.

"I was waiting for the Qatar flag, but nobody gave it to me as maybe nobody expected me to get a medal," he said.

In the placing table, which gives points based on Top 8 performances, the U.S. was on top with 231 points, followed by Russia with 154, Jamaica with 135, Kenya with 120 and Germany with 104.

Three World Records Fall

Diack said that Bolt "may now be the most famous sportsman in the world, not just in athletics."

Some observers had felt the track was too slow for Bolt to surpass his Beijing accomplishments of shattering three world records. The Beijing track was made by Mondo, while the Berlin track - blue because that's the color of the football club based in Olympic Stadium - was installed by Conica, a division of BASF.

Early in the meet, Jamaican sprinter Veronica Campbell-Brown said of the track surface. "A lot of people complain that this track is softer and because it is not Mondo, they will be quick to conclude that it is not as fast as Beijing. But I always say, great athletes make great tracks, so we'll just have to wait and see."

Besides Bolt's two world records, Anita Wlodarczyk of Poland set a world record with a throw of 77.96 meters (255 feet, 9 inches) in the women's hammer throw.Innovations in Berlin

The road races (walk and marathons) were held completely outside the stadium for the first time in World Championships history and centered around the "Kulturstadion" by the Brandenburg Gate. "They were a great success and this helped to create a special atmosphere in the city," Diack said.

Added competition manager Paul Hardy, "The images we present to the world come across so much better this way."

The IAAF also used a new technology called VDM (video distance measurement), developed by IAAF sponsor Seiko, as a backup in measuring the long jump and triple jump.

Hardy said VDM, which has been used on a trial basis for three or four years, will be the official measurement system at the 2010 World Indoor champs in Doha next winter. The IAAF is working with Seiko to provide the same system for the throwing events.

In addition, the netting of the discus throwing cage was transparent, which provided better viewing.

Doping and Gender Testing

The IAAF received notification from the Kreisha Laboratory of only one positive doping test: Amaka Ogoegbunam of Nigeria, who tested positive for the substance Metenolone (an anabolic steroid) from a urine sample collected after a women's 400-meter hurdles semifinal on August 18. She did not request analysis of the B sample.

The IAAF has been roundly criticized for its handling of the Semenya case. After a story leaked out in Australian media that she was undergoing gender testing, the IAAF addressed the issue, saying that because the tests had not been completed she would be allowed to run. After Semenya won the gold medal, the IAAF did not allow her to attend the press conference.

"You are perfectly right that this could been treated with more sensitivity," Diack said, "because it should not even have become a problem if the confidentiality" had not been compromised.

He added it was "definitely not a question of racism, as the president of the IAAF comes from Senegal. We wish we could have done better. It was her perfect right to run. We are waiting for the scientists to take this."

Possible Schedule Shortened?

Hardy said the IAAF has discussed decreasing the number of days of the championships. The meet is nine days to maximize television exposure over two weekends. However, with smaller networks and Web sites providing coverage on weekdays, that is no longer necessary.

"We are also looking at timetables," Hardy said, "and there will only be semi-finals and finals in evening sessions of future World Championships."Television Ratings and Internet Interest

On the day of the men's 100-meter final -- a Sunday -- the average evening session rating on German television was 5.4 million and the peak was 10 million, which is considered by German television the highest rating ever in an athletics event in Germany. "It's better than some of the Champions League soccer games, and it's certainly at World Cup football level," said IAAF marketing director Luis Carulla.

Also, the women's high jump, in which German Ariane Friedrich took the bronze, drew a peak of 8.6 million viewers.

Carulla said that on NBC, the major U.S. broadcaster, the meet received household ratings between 1.5 and 1.9, which he called "a satisfying rating for this kind of event," especially since a golf tournament starring Tiger Woods was being shown on a competing network.

Diack said that in France, the meet averaged between 3.5 and 4 million and in the UK "we had between 2.5 and 3.5 million while in Japan the average ranged between 4 and 5 million."

On the Internet, the IAAF said that the Berlin section of its Web site attracted 1, 313,159 unique users on Aug. 20, the sixth day of the meet, and 16,346,353 page views. The highest figures for Osaka two years ago were 320,762 unique users for the fourth day of competition, wth 6,585,520 page views.

IAAF World Challenge Circuit

The IAAF Council, meeting Aug. 22 in Berlin, decided to create an Athletic One-Day Competition System that will be a second tier of international meetings below the newly-created Diamond League, which launches in 2010. This is in line with the Athletics' World Plan.

The International One-Day meetings will be formed from those IAAF Permit Meetings that will not be part of the Diamond League, plus the meetings of Daegu, Korea, and Rabat, Morocco.

Potential participants in the 2010 IAAF World Challenge are Melbourne, Australia; Osaka, Japan; Dakar, Senegal; Belem, Brazil; Athens, Greece; Berlin, Germany; Hengelo, Netherlands; Madrid, Spain; Ostrava, Czech Republic; Rieti, Italy, and Zagreb, Croatia.

The program of any meeting of the IAAF World Challenge will be composed of 16 events with a minimum of seven by gender.Next World Championships

The 2011 World will be held in Daegu, South Korea, with the 2013 event in Moscow.

Diack said there were nine candidates for 2009, including Morocco, and he expected the African nation to host the World Championships in the future. However, he said the host city would not be Casablanca or Marrakech, but Tangiers, which is "very close to Spain and soon connected to the continent by railway."

Controversies over Protests

Doug Logan, chief of USA Track & Field, scolded Great Britain for helping bring about the disqualification of the U.S. men's 4 x 100-meter relay for handing off outside the zone. The British team, which would have qualified for the final anyway, wound up winning the bronze medal.

"There is an element of politics and sportsmanship that goes into any country's decision to lodge or not lodge a protest," Logan wrote in his online blog. "While our competitive status makes us targets, it also makes us hesitant to file protests against other countries' athletes, except when medals or the ability of our athletes to advance through the rounds is at stake. For instance, in the men's 110-meter hurdle heats here in Berlin, a competitor had clearly run in one of our athlete's lanes. But because our athlete qualified with no problem, we didn't file a protest. It simply would be bad international relations.

"One of the highest-ranking Brits in all of sport approached me after the men's 100-meter final and openly discussed his admiration for the way Tyson Gay carried himself in defeat. He described it as the finest display of sportsmanship he had ever seen. Having our friends from the playing fields of Eton then file their protest against us certainly hurt. I know we all hope that we won't be in that situation again.

Great Britain said it did not lodge a protest, but that its coaches' video was used by the judges.

Charles van Commenee told reporters, "I just reminded the officials of their job - they needed a bit of help.

"We tell our athletes to be alert on the track, and officials need to be alert off the track. We practice hard to get the baton round safely and within the rules, and those rules need to be applied fairly."

Fairness was taken to the extreme in the final of the 800 meters, where 10 men were allowed to compete in the final instead of the usual eight. Bram Som of the Netherlands and Marcin Lewandowski of Poland, who fell over Abubaker Kaki of Sudan when he tripped and fell in the semifinal, advanced to the final because officials ruled that Kaki had unfairly interfered with them.

"I'm actually very, very upset that there were 10 guys on the track," Nick Symmonds of the U.S. told the Eugene Register-Guard.

Symmonds, who was sixth, said that Som did not finish his semifinal. "I read the rulebook, and you have to finish a semifinal to get to be in the final," he said. "Why Som was in the final I'll never know. No excuses, but I blame the IAAF and USATF for that."

Written by Karen Rosen.