Last year’s World Athletics Championship in Eugene, Oregon – also known as Track Town USA – was quite the spectacle. Every national broadcasting channel served up a constant stream of updates, and the buzz surrounding the event reached new heights. Suddenly, athletes who once only made headlines at the Summer Olympics now felt like superheroes with performances that were simply beyond the realms of what “normal” humans could achieve. The sheer specificity, the chest-pumping celebrations, the amazing finishes – it all added up to one of the most watched world athletics championships ever.
A few years ago, while wading through old artefacts to kick off the heritage department at the sport’s governing body, someone from World Athletics came across a stack of scrapbooks from the inaugural 1983 World Championships in Helsinki. The rudimentary nature of the official documentation spoke volumes about how little attention the sport was paying to its history at that time.
Since then, however, things have changed a lot. The championships were brought to a biennial cycle and, more importantly, they’ve been elevated to the status of an Olympic-style competition. That’s thanks largely to Dutchman Adriaan Paulen, who was the first president of the International Association of Athletic Federations – now renamed World Athletics – to realise that it was high time for the sport to drag itself into the modern era of professionalism.
It’s an era that was ushered in by the 2023 championships held in Budapest, which saw record numbers of fans flock to the National Athletics Centre on the banks of the Danube. Some 404,088 people over the course of nine days generated an electrifying atmosphere that helped produce some spellbinding performances.
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