The race must start now to drag athletics into the 21st century
As long as scheduling is stuck in the 1970s, the sport will struggle to attract the young audience that is vital to its future
The good news is that a night at a global track and field meeting can still make the senses race, the heart pound. In London, at a sprawling 10-day jamboree that evokes a lost age of presentation, the men’s 10,000metres or women’s 1500m finals broke the excitement gauge.
Watching elite athletics, you are doomed to hear the internal background voice of doubt that calls out from bitter experience of being conned by dopers. This is true of many sports now. The split-brain reality of scepticism fighting pleasure is not going to lift until more of sport’s multi-billionpound income is diverted into making successful cheating virtually impossible. But against that backdrop, London 2017 has given us cause to think about what athletics may still offer – provided it steps out of the 1970s of stage management.
A preoccupation of mine at the Olympics and World Championships is that track and field is the only major sport still presenting itself pretty much as it did decades ago. There are still lots of things going on at once, events shoved over in corners of the ‘field’, no real illumination of what the big stories are, and a bizarrely elongated 10-day programme, unevenly laid out, with morning and evening sessions and an afternoon break that evokes the age of pubs closing after lunch.
These World Championships, meanwhile, are bookended by Mo Farah’s 10,000m win on the Friday night and Usain Bolt’s solo swansong in Saturday’s 100m final – and then, on the following weekend, Farah in the 5,000m and Bolt in the 4x100m relay. Obviously lots of good stuff will happen in between, but the mid-event lull is impossible to ignore. Part of this is to do with the odd historical marriage of track on the one hand and field on the other. What, you might ask, is Bolt doing sharing a stage with a shot-putter or a discus thrower?
In an interview before the Rio Olympics, Michael Johnson, the former Olympic 200m and 400m champion, said: “Hard decisions need to be taken to streamline an