IAAF reps from Monaco, Austria finish two days of meetings with organizing committee of 2010 meet

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By Cole Hobson
Times & Transcript Staff

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It might have been snowing in Metro yesterday, but that didn't derail the full-speed-ahead planning and preparation for the Moncton 2010 IAAF World Junior Track and Field Championships.

The local organizing committee met with senior staff from the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federation) and from Athletics Canada over the past couple days in order to visit the still under-construction stadium on the Université de Moncton campus and to assess the planning progress, ahead of the event, which will take place July 19-25.

"It's snowing. Fingers crossed not in July," joked Yannis Nikolaou, who is the communications manager for the IAAF.

Nikolaou lives in Monaco, is a former journalist and national level track athlete in Greece and was head of media organization for the Athens Olympics in 2004. He was joined in Moncton by Olaf Brockmann, who is a sports journalist at Austria's largest daily newspaper and acts as a delegate for IAAF.

Both men were quite pleased with what they had seen in Moncton.

"Myself, I'm really impressed with how the work is going on eight, nine months before the World Championships," Brockmann said. "The stadium will be very good ... it is planned really fantastic so far ... In this stadium, it's very, very good. It's well-organized, well-planned ...I'm really pleased about this in this stadium."

The men were in the Hub City primarily to assess the plans and preparations for the over 150 members of the media who are expected to come to the city for the event. Both men agreed things are shaping up nicely and that not only will the media be treated to a first-class experience, but the entire event seems like it will be a success.

"Normally when we go to a site visit to meet the organizers ... we start from scratch and we're trying to go to a level which is acceptable," Nikolaou said. "Here, when we arrived and we had the first meeting, at the end of the day I said to myself and to Olaf, 'OK, here we are starting from a very high level because they have an (organizing) team.'

"Normally, the first question is, 'They don't have a team, they are only two or three. What should we do now?' Here, they have a team. The second thing is that I have a feeling, after all these meetings, that it's a good team."

Linda Schofield, who is the event's general manager of marketing, said she is happy for the positive feedback and believes their meetings have been very beneficial.

"Since it's the largest sporting event that will ever be held in Atlantic Canada, we need to prepare well in advance, so they were here to review the operational plan ... ," she said. "It's very important to go over all the details. It's a great partnership; that's how we view the work we've done."

As passionately as he spoke about the strides he had seen with media services planning, Nikolaou spoke even more strongly about the event as a whole and how special it will be.

"I would like to highlight that this is a very big event. It's World Junior Championships and, unfortunately, in Canada maybe you cannot understand how big it is because our sport athletics or track and field in Canada, is not so popular like hockey or football," he said.

"It's the whole world. It's a real world championships. You will be host to almost 170 to 180, maybe more, countries and 2,000 athletes from everywhere. From Argentina, Samoa, from New Zealand, from China, from everything."

Nikolaou added that the event will also be a great chance to see a potential superstar of the future.

"You will have the chance to see real, believe me, some future Olympic champions," he said. "We should not forget that many great athletes, like Usain Bolt ...Olympic champions, world record holders, world champions, they started their career from this event."

While Moncton isn't a track and field hot spot compared to other areas of the globe where IAAF holds events, Mathieu Gentès of Athletics Canada is confident this event can go a long way toward helping change that.

"We don't see it as a disadvantage, we just see it as we have to put more plans into place marketing wise and promotion wise with the host organizing committee," he said. "But the opportunity, is this event provides a) a legacy for Atlantic Canada for track and field, but b) it provides us a chance to showcase the sport in Canada for six or seven days.

"If we do our plans correctly and execute correctly and (spectators) have a great time, they watch it on (TV), they love the show that is being put on, we're going to get more fans, we're going to get more people putting their kids into track and field. It's just an opportunity for us, that's all it is."