Weltklasse by name, world class by nature

By LEN JOHNSON

Zurich has often been characterised as 'the Olympics in one day'.

I've never liked the comparison. To me, it is manifestly unfair to the Olympics and to Zurich. In culinary terms ( and I hope I've got this right), the Olympics is degustation, a succession of courses complementing each other, an event to be sampled over nine days, with the preliminaries sometimes as fascinating as the main course.

Zurich, on the other hand, is not a banquet, but one spectacular course. Consumed in little more than two hours, it leaves a lingering taste that you can savour long after the coffee and after-dinner mints have come and gone. But you can't keep going back for more, day after day, as you do with the Olympics or the world championships.

Zurich is Zurich, the Olympics is the Olympics: to compare the two, or to define one in terms of the other, is to diminish both. That's my view of it, anyway.

I first came to Zurich after the first world championships in Helsinki in 1983. It seemed the obvious thing to do. Strangely enough, my contact for the world's best track meeting was provided by a marathoner, Dave Chettle, still one of Australia's fastest-ever. Dave knew the media director, which helped secure an accreditation.

On the day before the meeting, I saw Carl Lewis running for a tram. Though not an official event on the program, this was worth the price of the trip on its own. Seldom has a public transport vehicle been pursued with such effortless style and grace.

In those days, the meeting hotel was the InterContinental, just a couple of hundred metres down the road from the Letzigrund. If you couldn't stay there, or didn't want to, there was the Hotel Stoller, a traditional Swiss family business just another 100 metres away. It was from the Stoller's comfortable terrace chairs that I observed King Carl.

Later that night, I sent my story back to The Age. The hotel gave me access to its telex room after-hours. Telex seems primitive in this wireless era, but you punched your copy out on a conventional keyboard and it was recorded in code on a long ribbon of paper-tape. Things go awry at two o'clock in the morning, as we all know, and my first attempt to transmit the report failed. As I gathered the spools of tape to re-transmit, I stood on the ribbon, ripping it in two. Knowing no better, I fed the pieces through one after the other. Fortunately, it worked.

From then on, I tried to take in Zurich on every trip to Europe. I would tell The Age that all the top Australians would go there, neglecting to mention that this was likely to be as few as two or three.

My favourite Zurich was 1997, just after the Athens world championships, when three world records fell one after the other (something that doesn't happen at the Olympics, even in the Usain Bolt era). First Wilson Kipketer broke the record he and Sebastian Coe shared for 800 metres; then Wilson Boit Kipketer broke the steeple world record; finally, Haile Gebrselassie lowered the 5000 metres standard.

Nic Bideau, who back in those days worked for the Herald Sun, was there too. The paper had afternoon editions then, and Nick changed his lead three times _ once for each record!

Most drama came in 2004 when, in quick succession, Jana Pittman broke down during warm-up with a knee injury and, no sooner had we resumed our seats, Bernard Lagat edged past Hicham el Guerrouj in the final 50 metres of the 1500 to come within little more than a second of the Moroccan's world record. El Guerrouj reversed the result in Athens.

The Athens Olympic year was one of the occasions when Zurich preceded the major championships. Normally, it is the first meeting after, sometimes leading to suggestions athletes have gone soft of world records at the world championships in order to cash in at Zurich.

I prefer the post-championships timing, but 2004 certainly provided us with drama enough. The other great thing about Zurich is that, initially, you don't know where to look. Something is going on in every corner of the field, it seems. Then you realise the announcer is directing your attention to the most important points _ "Achtung, 100 metres"; "Achtung, Sergey Bubka" _ so you don't need to miss a thing.

The other word in the Zurich meeting title is Weltklasse, which translates as world class. That's the bit I buy. Whenever it is, whomever it features, you can always rely on Zurich to be weltklasse.


 

Len Johnson was The Melbourne Age athletics writer for over 20 years, covering five Olympics, 10 world championships and five Commonwealth Games. He is the author of The Landy Era, From Nowhere to the Top of the World, and a former national class distance runner (2.19.32 marathon) who trained with Chris Wardlaw and Robert de Castella.

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