2019 World Athletics Championships: a bad omen?
By Guillaume Mahot
The 2019 IAAF World Athletics Championships, which began on September 27th in Doha, Qatar, ended up this week (October 6th) on an American victory. The Uncle Sam country grabbed twenty-nine medals (fourteen in gold, eleven in silver and four in bronze) before Kenya, ranking second thanks to eleven medals (only) but five in gold. Jamaica, without Usain Bolt, completes the podium while the host country is far away (sixteenth) with only two medals.
The Ethiopian performance is to underline as well (ranking fifth), just like Uganda and their two gold medals for the ninth rank shared with the Netherlands. Unfortunately for sport still, the competition was not the main discussion subject in Qatar, where the unbearable heat endangered the athletes’ health and had a negative effect on those championships.
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The images were broadcast all over the world. The feminine marathon was, let us call it, a complete disaster with about thirty withdrawals due to the extreme warmth combined with a high humidity rate (60-70%). In such conditions, worrying about the athletes’ health was the biggest apprehension instead of guessing who was going to win. But the weather conditions were not the only issue.
Is Qatar really interested in athletics? The question deserves to be asked, especially when you consider the fact that stadiums were practically always empty during the competition. In spite of an attracting price policy, seats remained unoccupied and authorities are even said to have paid people to attend events while some others were allowed to come freely. Among those ones, a big part was actually the manpower who had contributed to build those infrastructures, sometimes, often in poor and dangerous conditions and without any social protection…
How not to think about the upcoming big tournament in 2022 then? The FIFA World Cup has been granted to Qatar and some voices already call for football teams to boycott this one edition. Today, when you watch a football game occurring in Qatar, you can already notice that stadiums are empty. Why should it be different in three years? When you do not like something, you do not start getting crazy about it simply because a tournament is happening in your country. The 2019 athletics championships prove it. Plus the fact that the warmth will still be an issue for the ones on the pitch. This should be the beginning of a long-lasting concern.
Africa Global News Publication
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