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Athletics: A ring on the Opera Square – Sport

The ambience at the Sechseläutenplatz, directly on Lake Zurich, is remarkable on this warm summer evening: a catwalk for the pole vaulters, a ring for the muscle men with the iron balls, a 563-metre-long mobile plastic track with elevated curves for the long-distance experts. Even the full grandstands have, so to speak, moved out of the stadium on Zurich’s Letzigrund.

It’s like a circus coming to town – only the performers are the world’s best track and field athletes who have qualified for the finals of the Diamond League series. The people of Zurich have divided the program again this year: 26 disciplines on Thursday in the traditional Letzigrund, six on Wednesday in the city center. Taking the sport to the cities isn’t a new concept, but the Diamond League — after all, the premier series of meetings for track and field athletes — has taken years to assimilate that circus character. And how that can revitalize a sport that is often perceived as outdated can be seen in the Swiss metropolis these days.

“We’re also a great advertisement for stadium athletics,” says shot putter Joe Kovacs

The people who enter the interior via two bridges in order to be able to walk from facility to facility are well dressed, they come directly from the offices. “Come in and experience history,” sounds the stadium announcer, while people sit on the lake promenade, enjoy the end of the day – or come in. World class for free entry, this offer is gladly accepted. 7,000 spectators and a spectator on the sidelines experience how World Cup runner-up Joe Kovacs from the USA heaves the 7.26-kilo ball to a world best of 23.23 meters for the year. It’s the second longest shot in history, only Olympic gold medalist Ryan Crouser, second that night, shot 14 centimeters further in his world record.

Such a ring is of course also predestined for showmen like Gianmarco Tamberi, the high jump Olympic champion from Italy, who seems to be celebrating his wedding with the audience the week before on Wednesday. Tamberi manages to silence 7000 people, then to ecstasy as he manages 2.34 meters. There’s 30,000 euros and a diamond as a bonus, not a bad addition to finance a lavish wedding.

Schaumann: Gianmarco Tamberi celebrates his Diamond League overall victory in front of the opera backdrop.

(Photo: Fabrice Coffrini /AFP)

“This is an extraordinary presentation of our sport,” says shot putter Kovacs, impressed by the ambience: “We are also a great advertisement for stadium athletics.” Because there are no such meetings in the USA, he wants to try to establish shot put in fitness centers and on parking decks at home. Away from the traditional power cells, as Zurich is for athletics, the core sport of the Olympics is no longer as exciting as it used to be. “Our sport can only survive if it is innovative,” commented Sebastian Coe, President of the World Athletics Federation, on the first edition of Markt und Manege in Zurich last year.

This time lightning and thunder announce the finale of the evening performance: the 5000 meter runners run on the mobile track around the opera house. Cheers erupt once more as Dominic Lobalu, a Swiss-based athlete from South Sudan, finishes second in 12:59.40, beaten by 35 hundredths.

Athletics: A backdrop where art and sport merge: the 5000 meter runners with the opera house in the background.

A backdrop where art and sport merge: the 5000 meter runners with the opera house in the background.

(Photo: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty)

It is no coincidence that it is a Swiss location that attracts attention with such innovations: the national association Swiss Athletis launched a new concept for the 2014 European Championships in Zurich. “More than ten years ago we brought athletics back into schools and then promoted our sport with systematic promotion of young talent,” says Andreas Hediger, one of the directors of the Zurich meeting.

While contact with young talent is being lost in Germany, the Swiss are setting up new concepts

And while Jürgen Kessing, President of the German Athletics Association, recently stated after the disappointing World Cup performance that school sport had been lost, Hediger refers to the UBS Kids Cup: a new competition for young people, sponsored by one of the then EM sponsors, around 1.9 million participants to date. Two faces of today’s successes are children of this initiative: sprinter Mujinga Kambundji and decathlete Simon Ehammer. “After that, there was professionalization and the awareness that a Swiss woman can also be a professional in athletics,” Kambundji notes today.

The successes speak for themselves: The Swiss track and field athletes won three medals at the World Indoor Championships last March, and Kambundji was even the fastest over 60 meters (6.96 seconds) in the world best time of the year. In Munich they were more successful than ever before with six European Championship medals. Last year, two Swiss women were in the 100-meter Olympic final in Kambundji and Ajla del Ponte. Decathlete Ehammer, second behind Niklas Kaul at the European Championships in Munich, recently set a world record within the all-around with 8.45 meters, in Eugene he also won world championship silver in the long jump. Incidentally, seven Swiss men and women found themselves among the top eight in a final – and thus just as many as from the German team, which was around three times larger.

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