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More blog articles OSAKA 12 - AW's team effort
Your favourite magazine has three people covering the World Champs, but only one of us flew the AW flag in a special media 800m race
OF course Athletics Weekly’s coverage from Osaka is far from being a solo effort. In addition to posting regular articles on to our website, I am covering the men’s events for the magazine while Steve Smythe is compiling the women’s reports. Then there’s our photographer Mark Shearman - or ‘snapper’ as he prefers to call himself in comparison to ‘scribblers’ such as me.
Steve is your archetypal distance runner. He’s trained and raced with ferocious consistency since his school days and has completed, for example, all but one of the London Marathon races and as an M45 he clocked the impressive 2:43:53 last year. When it comes to writing about athletics, he is also vastly experienced – having covered every world championships since 1997.
Out here in Osaka, though, he has endured a rather torrid time. No amount of experience can help you when your laptop goes on the blink and Steve’s machine has developed a severe case of screen damage. Local organisers have done their best to solve his problem and gave him an additional, portable screen yesterday. But things are far from perfect and Steve is struggling to get his words back to AW’s HQ in England.
Add to this the fact Steve has hardly been able to run – and the net result is that he’s mildly frustrated to say the least. Firstly, central Osaka is a runner’s nightmare, with very few clear paths or decent parks to trot around. He has also been injured for weeks with a niggling hamstring injury. But despite this he bravely shrugged aside his problems and lined up in the media race on Thursday afternoon.
An annual event at the major summer track and field championships, journalists from all around the world compete in a low-key series of graded races, usually over 800m, in the main stadium during the afternoon break. The idea is that the journos enjoy an ‘athlete experience’ by going through a similar warm-up and call-up routine.
But AW’s entrant is not in peak form due to injury and rumbled around the third of seven races in 2:36.19 – a time that placed him second in his heat and 27th overall out of 58 runners. "My slowest time since I was 11 years old," grinned Steve.
The good news was that American writer Parker Morse, who won a journalists’ sweepstake on the men’s 100m final earlier in the championships (see Osaka Blog 7) didn’t win either – he was seventh overall. And the British media men did well in general, with Mark Butler, the BBC’s statistician, for example, winning his heat in a time of 2:20.56 to place ninth overall.
Ian O’Riordan, an Irish sports writer, was second overall in 2:13.42, but the clear winner was an Icelandic journalist called Arngrimsson Sigurbjorn with a time of 2:01.20.
What about me? Despite being a keen runner – and a former 800m runner too – I have never done the media race a summer championships. So I think I’ll save myself for when it really matters – in London 2012.
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