The 19th Athletics World Championships were held in Budapest from August 19th to 27th and I must say that they were great, despite the paucity of world records. (In fact only one WR, the one of the 4x400 m mixed relay, was improved during the championships). I could follow the competitions on the World Athletics youtube channel and it was great experience.
As for the Diamond League competitions, World Athletics broadcasts the video of the event to the countries where the TV rights have not been conceded. Usually it is quite easy to find such a country to point the VPN to: not so for the world championships. Fortunately the Watchathletics site was giving the information that the only country having access to the youtube livestream was Taiwan. That did suffice: I connected to Taiwan and could follow the competition on my iMac and iPad. And just in case I would like to go back to some event, when writing my report, I downloaded and saved everything (thanks to that fantastic app Downie). Speaking of videos to keep, WA was providing also complete livestreams for field events. Thus, if necessary, one could go back and have the full picture of a specific event. The technical commentaries were entrusted to H. England (1500 m silver medalist in the 2011 World's) and D. O'Brien (olympic and world decathlon champion, and world record holder).
The new rules concerning the qualification for the final in middle distance events, athlete replacement, lane attribution, running under protest, etc. were implemented in Budapest. As I wrote in a recent article of mine, I am 100 % in favour of athlete replacement for semis or finals, instead of leaving a slot empty. In Budapest, European U20 champion A. Caune, from Latvia, ran a captivating 5000 m in the semis, running to the front, with a distance between herself and the group of chasers larger than 100 m at some point, not being caught up till the finish straight and being qualified for the final with a new personal best. Unfortunately, she had to withdraw from the final due to an injury and she was replaced by F. Niyomukunzi who was classified 17th in the semis.
The new rule that I believe everybody appreciated was that of the qualification to the next round being based on place only (and not a combination of place and time as previously). The rule applies to distances from 1500 to 5000 m and that's where I have an objection. The results of the 800 m men and women semifinals show that 3 out of 4 qualified for the final on the basis of time came from the third (and last) heat. I don't think that this is a coincidence. The 800 m is not run all-out and I think that people running in the last heat will definitely try to adapt their pace to the time needed for qualification. So, why not extend the rule of qualification through place to the 800 m as well? In fact I would suggest to apply the same rule to the 4x400 m as well. After all the overall distance is longer than 1500 m.
What I also find interesting is the new attitude of WA to give a chance to athlete who have been impeded by some incident. So, whenever that was possible there were an extra athlete or team participating in a final. Mind you, this has nothing to do with the 100 m women's final where 9 athletes took the start.
I already wrote about this in my article on "millisecond stupidity".
One thing that I appreciated hugely in this championship was the absence of hyperandrogenic, or DSD, female competitors. The new rules allowed us to do away with the athletes who have been disfiguring our sport. In my opinion the natural next step should be to erase the records of Semenya, Niyonsaba, Mboma etc. but I don't believe that WA will find the courage to do this. On a related subject, during the heats of the mixed 4x400 m relay, the team of Dominican Republic was absent. The reason is simple: a few weeks before the championship there was a leak that F. Cofil, the second female runner of the relay, was in fact DSD and could not take part in the championship. I can understand the Dominican team being unable to replace Cofil or unwilling to present a less performing team, but I do wonder why WA did not invite the next team to participate in the event.
As I wrote in the title, the 2023 championship was a great vintage, "une grande cuvée" to use the wine-related french expression. In the articles that will follow this one I will tell the story event by event (and I will have something to say even about race-walking events).
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