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From the Press Box by Sa'adi Thawfeeq

Bjorn Wangemann, a director of the International Association of Athletic Federation (IAAF), and a top official of the world controlling body for the sport was all praise for the manner in which the XIVth Asian Athletic Championships was conducted in Colombo last month.

Wangemann described the running of the championship as "excellent" and said it was the best ever from an organisational point of view. That was Wangemann's point of view.

Usually there are two sides to a story. Having published Wangemann's views on the championship in our columns on August 14, we now present the other side of the story as seen through the eyes of a foreign journalist who was in Colombo to cover the event for his magazine 'The Sportstar.'

Extracts of the article which appeared in the August 31 issue is published herewith:

"Since we cannot question the parameters by which Wangemann assessed the championships, we will only try to present the championships the way we saw it. Or the way we failed to see!

"To begin with, there was no Press box! If there was one, we were not told about it nor could we spot it. We did have a working area, what the local officials called the 'sub press centre'. We were asked to sit there, watch athletics and do our reports. Sort of two-in-one you could say. We were six reporters from India plus four photographers.

There were about half a dozen local reporters too. Most of the local journalists, we came to know later, were forced to wander about much of the time.

"The sub press center, a glass cage which could at best have seated around 25 to 30 people was crammed with equipment and people who had no business to be there. The men in charge of information and results systems were occupying the computer terminals meant for the press. This despite the fact that there was a computer section at the adjacent room and there were about 20 men working there.

"Then there were curious onlookers, all of them with some accreditation card or the other. At any given time there were about 80 to 100 people coming in and going out of that room. But getting disturbed was only part of the problem. We could not see much of what was going on in front. From where we operated, the 100m stretch could not be seen as one full straight. It had to be watched in segments! Forget viewing the full 400 metres. "There was only one 21-inch TV monitor inside the sub press center. The electronic scoreboards were mere decorations. A track side timer made its appearance only on the second day while scoreboards at the field events were either operated haphazardly or were non-existent.

"To add to our woes the main press center shockingly did not have IDD phone lines. Nor was there any provision to provide results speedily.

"With just one photo-copying machine available at the sub press center, there was always a mad rush to get the latest results. There was no method in announcing that a result was being withdrawn or to suggest that a particular set of results were being revised.

"Just one example will suffice. In the men's 3000 steeplechase, Saudi Arabian Sa'ad Shaddad Al-Asmari was at first put down as the winner with a time of 8:09.67 followed by Qatari Khamis Abdulla at 8:10.34. Much after international agencies had filed their flash reports with Al-Asmari as the winner came a revised list.

"We also found after the championships that the men's 10,000m timing were 'changed' to electronic after we were given and had reported a set of hand-timings.

"To our horror we noticed that Chinese Qi Haifeng had 'disappeared' in the final standings of the decathlon after having led at the end of nine events. Eventually we found that there was a DNS (did not start) in one of the sheets against his name in the 1500m.

"There were several wind-readings in many events which were listed as 0.0. It apparently meant that no one had taken a wind-reading or else someone was too lazy to write it down in the official score sheets. Otherwise in a meet which had head winds going up to as high as 3.1 disturbing the sprints the sight of '0.0' for the entire series of jumps in women's long jump cannot be explained.

"There was an area designated to conduct post-event interviews of medallists. We never saw anyone being brought there.

Nor could we find what could be called a 'mixed zone' meaning an area where the press, television, radio etc could conduct flash interviews with competitors.

" There was a zone between the sub press center and the VIP stands in which the athletes tried to slip into their track-suits or pull out their spikes, amidst milling crowds!

"If you still want to call these championships the best ever, we are not going to complain. For we are through with it. We only hope the Filipinos don't get ideas. Manila is the next stop in 2003."

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