End of the Athletics

To reiterate what the title tells, today is the last day of the 2005 World Athletics Championships. Hopefully this means the weather is going to return to normal - it's been bad enough that the odd events had to be postponed, and on one occassion all the screens and electronics in the arena had to be powered down for two hours during a thuderstorm! Ah the arena, very old, very beautiful, very exposed. Very illustrious too - before the dominance of Kenyans, Ethiopians et al, the Finns were the kings of long distance running, and so successful in the 1920s that they decided to try to host the Olympics. The stadium was inaugurated in 1938, a pesky world war got in the way, and they didn't get the Olympics till 1952. It's still the smallest city ever to host a Summer Games, and has hosted the World Championships twice now, which deserves respect. Imagine Dublin trying to host anything...

I'll be wandering in to see the women's marathon in town in about an hour. The walking and marathon courses are a little funny if you know the city. They're described as 10km loops showing the most beautiful streets of the capital, but 4 kilometres in any direction from the start and you've left the city centre for apartment-suburbia (or if you travel due south, for the middle of the Baltic). The solution has been to have competitors run up, then down the same streets. Repeatedly. They're lovely streets, mind, but if TV coverage is giving you the impression that Helsinki all looks the same, it's really more varied a city than the routes suggest.