Flashes of Panic

I haven’t traveled more than a short walk from the hotel, which is not exactly in the city center, but I’ve done some not-insignificant tourism today.

Counting the main stadium, there are four tracks in a short distance from here. I’ve now run on two of them, one apparently being the warm-up track for the meet, a four-lane all-weather affair and pretty hard, relatively speaking. This morning I did a workout of quarters with short recovery on a second. This one is barely a track any longer; it’s more like a nice trail that happens to be laid out in a roughly quarter-mile oval around a soccer field. The only sign that it was once in use as a track is some traces of the old inside curb and a rail around the outside. The second bend, in fact, goes through awnings set up for the patio of a nearby beer garden. Fortunately for me, they were not serving at the time of my run.

I checked out the stadium following the afternoon press conference (Pierre Weiss of the IAAF, betraying his current workplace in Monaco, said, “We hope the weather is good, and we hope not everyone goes to the beach.”) It was just a short look-around, since I’ll be spending plenty of time there over the weekend, but it was interesting in that it was a stadium for the ‘06 World Cup (there are photos of celebrations in Stuttgart about the German team’s third-place finish) and also the site of the 1993 World Championships. (On the other side of my hotel is the Porsche Arena, which recently (last month) hosted the World Championships in Gymnastics, and beyond that, I think, is Hans-Martin-Schleyer-Halle, which hosts the Sparkassen indoor track meet every winter, one of the top indoor meets in Europe if not the world.)

Unlike many large stadiums I’ve been in, with steeply-raked seating, this one is very gradually banked, more like the front rows of Fenway Park (or what I remember of the old Wembley, which I visited once in ‘99.) I tried, but failed, to get a good photo of it from my next stop.

Being on Mercedesstraße, it’s unsurprising that I’m a short walk away from the Mercedes-Benz Museum; the original Daimler plant turns out to have been here, and there’s still a significant werk over there, I think producing engines. My brother, who used to work in one of the ramified streams of the automotive-industry river, would’ve killed me if I hadn’t visited, being so close. So I went over there and wound up spending three hours, including an extra-fare ride in a racing simulator.

I’ll post some photos and add some links later, but Lamine Diack and the regional “minister president” have invited me (and a few hundred more of their closest friends) to a reception at the Neues Schloss this evening, and I must iron a shirt if I hope to look even halfway respectable.

(Update: Photos and some links added. Reception turned into a multi-lingual dinner in which English was a minority (I listened in on an extended conversation, in Greek, about their elections, and came out wiser than I’d gone in: now I know the topic exists) but wine was provided—my ironing detained me too long to hear the speeches, what a shame. Happily, I was able to catch a ride back to the hotel, rather than having to wait for the train.)

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