Anyone watching? That finish by Ingebrigtsen was quite something. I enjoyed the astonished commentary!
The mixed relay should be fun later. It’s always a bit chaotic.
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Looking forward to the mixed relay. Shame about the empty seats
Love to hate Greg Rutherford
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Yeah from some angles it looks deserted.
Good finish to the relay there. I thought John was going to fade but she didn’t
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Seems to have been pretty poorly promoted and some of the tickets are silly money to watch a bit of running around.
Great first day, especially the Norwegians with Jakob’s smooth finish and Jaeger powerhousing in the relay. Good to see Amy Hunt win gold, I didn’t quite have faith that she would, but could see she was winning from about 70m.
Yeah, the empty seats are embarrassing. I think athletics are probably charging too much - I think the London Diamond League seats were something mad like 5 times the ones in Rome.
Also worry just how popular athletics still is in Britain - feels like most folk would rather watch F1, darts or even American sports these days.
Feel we need one or two more genuine British world class stars for people to really take notice. We’re a solid top 10 country but only 1 gold in the athletics at Paris 2024 shows a lack of elite talent. the preceding two Olympics were similar with only Mo Farah a champion.
I priced up taking the family on Saturday night and it’d be £200. that’s just not feasible. if it was under £100 then I’d be tempted.
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True - although it doesn’t really bother me much whether Brits win or not. Nice if they do, but I’m a fan of European athletes in general. Hate to say it, but the temporary kick Usain Bolt gave athletics 18 years ago was ultimately bad for it. Maybe people just expect there to always be that standard.
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I mentioned this last night somewhere else but in the first half hour of their coverage last night the bbc showed precisely one piece of the day’s coverage: one 100m heat. The rest was taken up with tedious montages of Daley Thompson etc and interminable talking heads, plus hilariously a bit of footage intended to be about one of the British competitors but was accidentally footage of a different length race that she wasn’t in.
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Also there was (what felt like) a good while where they were showing the 5000m but from a helicopter/drone so you couldn’t actually see what was going on
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Yeah that was exactly when Ingebrigtsen moved up from the back wasn’t it
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I’ve been getting adverts on instagram for it for the past year so maybe they’ve spent the promotions budget on targeting me (I’m not going)
Yes the drone shots were annoying in the relay too. The traditional moving camera on a rail inside the track (hard to describe, but hopefully you know what I mean) provides much better footage. I see drone cameras like AI use in a way - just because they can be used, doesn’t mean they should!
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Think I saw one of these guys during the relay
https://marathonhandbook.com/unicycle-cameraman-steals-spotlight-at-world-athletics-relays/
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This has been my main bugbear for years - and I’ve even mentioned it on BBC feedback. Frequently during championships they’ll switch from e.g. the men’s discus or javelin (where there are never any UK entrants) happening live to the studio to talk around qualification we’ve just watched or, even worse, show a Keeley Hodgkinson interview for the fortieth time. The Diamond League coverage never gets this and literally no athletics fans want it, but they persist. Nothing wrong with showing the live action and cutting the mics into the studio from the commentary team for a short while.
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Simple solution: just show loads of old clips of Steve backley coming second in things instead. Then cut to him trackside. “Ha ha well we all had a bit more hair in those days didn’t we. Ha ha”
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Feel like there’s been absolutely no promotion of it around the city.
Maybe The Europeans are well into their athletics and lap it up at those rates but don’t think Brits are gonna pay those prices for something they only pretend to care about once every four years.
The Commonwealth Games went down well a few years back, so if you promote it well and get people invested in it and price it well people will go for it but think they’ve fucked it on both counts with this.
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I got a London diamond league ticket for £26 this year. I think that’s really good value compared to other sports. Were Rome tickets really under £6? I’d be surprised. View was decent, too and think it was listed as a 60,000 sell out. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the biggest crowd of any of the 15?worldwide diamond league events. Doesn’t seem like athletics is unpopular in Britain, compared to other countries.
Think the European championships suffer compared to other sports, eg footy, rugby in that the quality is patchy at best. Diamond league quality is far better
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If they’d held it in London it would have sold out, I think.
It’s a bit like test cricket in the UK.
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