The Electronic Telegraph Tuesday 24 July 2001 Tom Knight SUCH was the success of Sunday night's British Grand Prix at Crystal Palace, it was no surprise yesterday to find Fast Track, the promoters, still cooing about a job well done. So they should have been. This was a meeting which truly lived up to all the hype and expectation, unlike so many others on the circuit. The Crystal Palace extravaganza cost a whopping £1 million to stage and boasted most of the biggest names in athletics. But the reason the meeting sparkled so brightly in the cool night air of a south London summer was because the star athletes performed well and, with the selection deadline for the World Championships looming, every event mattered. The 17,000 capacity crowd were on their feet from the moment the athletes entered the home straight in the first track race of the night. In world terms, the 800 metres would have ranked no higher than a B-race, but the key element was that it contained three Britons desperately trying to run quicker than 1min 46sec in order to be included in Britain's team for the championships, which start on Friday week. For Simon Lees, James McIlroy and Neil Speaight, the attempt failed. In the women's 5,000m, however, as Paula Radcliffe romped to victory, the normally unheralded Hayley Yelling found herself the focus of the crowd's enthusiasm as she improved her personal best by more than three seconds to finish 10th with the time needed for the trip to Canada. The pity for Fast Track and UK Athletics is that the International Amateur Athletic Federation rank their meetings with a points system based on the number of Grand Prix-qualified athletes on the start line. It may well be, therefore, that at the end of the season a Golden League meeting like Monte Carlo might be deemed to have been of higher quality than London but, despite the discrepancy, the athletes are fast discovering where they prefer to perform. Zurich have their Weltklasse - World Class - meeting which has long revelled in its reputation of staging `the Olympics in one night' but they now have a serious challenger in London. Alan Pascoe, the seemingly tireless chairman of Fast Track, said: "Athletes thrive on the response of a big crowd and when they come to London, they know they have to deliver. "When we took over promoting the British meetings, not everyone thought we were going down the right path, but we've persevered. We know that as well as having athletes perform well, we need to put on a good show for the fans. They need to be entertained. "If people left thinking that was a sporting event they needed to be at, then we've done our job. Maybe it's time to talk about Zurich and London in the same breath." Fast Track's next gig should present them with more problems. The company are handling the bilingual MC duties in Edmonton, where the crowd may not take kindly to being told which particular world-class athletes they should be watching. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- PASCOE'S achievements were not just confined to the arena. In order to overcome Crystal Palace's notorious transport problems, Fast Track managed to get RailTrack to change their weekend engineering schedule and persuade Connex South Central to lay on extra trains on the night when their contract was due to expire. No mean feat. AN EVENING of such unprecedented success could not have been more timely, coming as it did in the middle of Fast Track's negotiations with Norwich Union over the renewal of their four-year, £10 million contract with athletics. Athletics' gain could be cricket's loss. Norwich Union are reviewing their entire sponsorship programme, which includes their investment in cricket's 45-over one-day league. Like the contract they have with athletics, the cricket deal has only a year to run. With the company understood to be considering consolidating their sponsorship with a single sport, the fact that the Crystal Palace meeting coincided with England's abject failure against Australia at Lord's could mean another massive boost for athletics. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- IN CHINA, meanwhile, venue of the 2008 Olympic Games, it has emerged that the last has not been seen of the controversial coach, Ma Junren. State media reports claim Ma, whose runners were axed from China's Sydney Olympics team because of doping concerns, will be in Edmonton as the deputy head coach. Ma's unorthodox training regime has provoked criticism and led to rifts with sports officials and athletes. He shocked the track world at the Stuttgart World Championships in 1993, when his team of unknown peasant women from the north-eastern province of Liaoning - the so-called Ma's Army - won five of six medals at 5,000m and 10,000m. A month later they shattered three world records at the Chinese national championships. Ma vigorously denied allegations that his runners were fuelled by banned drugs and attributed their times to high-altitude training and traditional tonics of turtle blood and caterpillar fungus. He was due to make a dramatic comeback in Sydney but on the eve of the Games, Ma and seven members of his `army', along with 21 other athletes, were dropped - a move many observers attributed to China's determination to win the 2008 Games. Eamonn Condon www.RunnersGoal.com
