Day One European Championships (and a couple of art galleries)

The Olympic stadium in Helsinki is one of those sports stadia that can justly be called iconic. Its a striking modernist building with a tower to one side and a pleasing bowl shape. But it was the 1952 Olympics for which it was built, so its not exactly state of the art. And somehow since 1994 when I was last here for a European Athletics Championships my mind had clearly blotted out one of its spectator features. It has no seats. Only wooden benches which curve round the stadium. No doubt very eco-friendly, but not very bottom-friendly. And while the souvenir shop would let me acquire any number of branded t-shirts, key-rings, baseball caps and fridge magnets, huge fluffy cushions weren't on the list. To make matters worse they have reversed the trend of nearly 20 years ago when they tried to stretch out the events to a week, now they were compressing them into 5 days. But its still the same number of events and athletes haven't got that much quicker at doing them, so the sessions just have to be bum-numbingly longer.

In time for the 2005 world championships they added a second roof to the stadium, under which I had my seat, sorry, allotted bench space. Now the good news of a roof of course is that when it rains you don't get wet, unlike the poor souls on the bends. But there is a disadvantage of being in the shade too. The ambient air-temperature was often pretty low. And when added to a strong wind the result is that one can be freezing cold. And indeed on the first morning I came in a jacket over a sweat shirt (hardly under-dressing for the end of June) to which I quickly added my waterproofs over the top for extra warmth, but I was still shivering. Which was especially galling when less than 50 metres to my left in the cheap uncovered seats there were guys sunbathing shirtless!

Gradually the sun works its way across the stadium and by early afternoon it finally arrived where I was. So I too had a few minutes of basking in the warm sun, whereupon a dirty great cloud followed and it promptly chucked it down. This became a bit of a recurring theme.

The other unfortunate aspect of these championships is that GB sent a much weakened team, so while we might have had a decent chance of topping the medal table with a full squad, we were very much sending a second string team with a few exceptions, the rest keeping their powder dry for the Olympics.

So day one started with the women's long jump qualifying for which I had the perfect view right over the long jump pit.  9am start, which given a two hour time differential meant 7am back in blighty. So I could watch our entrant, Abigail Irozuru, crash out before breakfast on day one, with two no jumps followed by a pretty disappointing third and final effort. Became a recurring theme.

It was also the start of the decathlon. One of the great features of attending a championships is you get to see the multi-events, which are great spectacles. Rather like some reality game show you get quite into following the competitors through all the different disciplines, and somehow you start to develop favourites. GB put out our second string decathlete, Ashley Bryant, who actually had a very decent competition finishing 12th out of 18 finishers in the end (and a further 8 falling by the wayside).

A fine effort too by the ageing ex-champion Roman Sebrle (his European record being set more than 10 years ago). And I started to follow his young Czech compatriot Adam Helcelet, just because he looked like some cool surfer dude. In the end they finished 7th an 8th behind the German Pascal Behrenbruch, an impressively tall chap who was an awesome thrower. He was doing fine until the penultimate event when his javelin just blew away the rest of the field, allowing him to take it easy in the final 1500m.

Its ok, I won't give you a blow by blow account of every event on this blog, just a few highlights and a few action shots (with a strong bias to the horizontal jumps since they were played out right in front of me along the back straight).

I managed to squeeze in a late lunch and before the evening session take in a couple of art galleries. One is small but imposing classical house which is an exhibition space for City of Helsinki Museum. It featured an exhibition on Finnish manufactured goods. And typically for Helsinki, it was immaculately laid out and the labelling was all in English, as well as Finnish and Swedish, and really well translated English too.

And then I had time to visit the modern art gallery, the Kiasma. Like I am afraid many modern art galleries, the building was more impressive than the majority of the exhibits. Although there was one red sculpture, inspired by jet engines, that was very striking and which did encourage one to actually examine it in detail.

Anyway it was good place to shelter from the rain.

Then back for the evening session, now on a somewhat wet track.

Of course, before you can have finals you need heats, except for the long distance events. So the first day  featured just one final, the men's 5000m. And this included one of our A list runners, Mo Farah. Very encouragingly he took gold at an absolute canter. His was one of the few victory ceremonies I bothered to attend, these being held after the events and in the event park, an area in front of the stadium containing exhibition stalls, food stalls and a stage for after event entertainment.