Flashes of Panic

This afternoon I found myself standing in an echoing concrete tunnel interviewing a Kenyan (a naturally soft-spoken bunch) with the worst of our three digital recorders while a thousand German pre-teen girls stood at the end of the tunnel chanting “FRANKA!!!” at the top of their high-pitched lungs in an effort to get their new hero to come down and sign her name to anything that would take a mark.

So it’s possible that my headline quote was… a little distorted. (“Even if he didn’t say it, he’d probably thank you for writing it,” said my editor.)

Either way, that’s my first feature story of the weekend. (I have this week to write a story for the IAAF Magazine now, as well.) The rest of my work has largely been along the lines of quick, 150-to-300-word recaps of what just happened (how much can you write about a race that lasts less than 14 seconds?), about midway between the very short form of the IAAF “blog” in Osaka and the longer analyses I did in the RW Osaka blog. With thirty-six events on the weekend, four of us split into two teams; my pair took the women on Saturday and the men on Sunday (which happened to give us ten events each day, but I had a light load outside the reports so I’m not complaining), and did our best to divide those events in a way that let us write and post as soon as possible after the event. So, in the name of recording the links and without at all claiming these as great literature, here’s my output:

• Women’s 3,000m Steeplechase
• Women’s High Jump
• Women’s 1,500m
• Women’s 200m
• Women’s 5,000m
• Men’s Pole Vault
• Men’s 1,500m
• Men’s 5,000m
• Men’s 200m
• Men’s 110m hurdles

I’m still trying to work out the gamesmanship involved in passing heights in the vertical jumps, particularly in the men’s pole vault, but I can understand when I see a bar raised to a world-record height.

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