Weltklasse Zürich

I've been looking forward to today for a long while.  I'm not really one for watching sports: during our Sunday phone calls, my grandma would always have to fill me in as to how professional baseball and football teams were doing. But I make an exception for track and field. I love watching people run in circles!

New last year, the elite Diamond League is a series of track and field meets that have been held across the world: this year, the series started in May, and it culminates with finals today in Zürich and next week in Brussels.

I totally got to go!

This being Switzerland, the seats for the meet were insanely expensive, and by the time I got around to ordering tickets there were only about a dozen left in the whole stadium, but there were still several dozen of the considerably cheaper standing-room tickets available for the quiet side of the track, down by the pole vault pit.  The Letzigrund stadium for the event is only about two miles from our home, just past the Letzigraben pool (where I did my famous leap of the high, high diving board) so I figured I'd be able to get there easily, and early enough to get a good spot.

Dennis came home early so that I could get to the stadium in good time, but me being me, I realized when I was about a quarter-mile from the stadium that I'd forgotten my ticket.  Stauffacher!  I also decided that I could do with an umbrella: it was starting to drizzle. 

I phoned Dennis, who, he being he, offered to pack up the kids and deliver the tickets to me.  But it was getting towards bedtime, and I didn't want their evening so disrupted.

But, after I hung up, as I was jogging home, I realized that, maybe with a little help from Ella, I could shave fifteen or twenty minutes off my trip. I called back and asked Dennis to have Ella run the tickets the few blocks down the end of our street for me. When I reached the corner of Wasserschöpfi, there she was, hurrying down the sidewalk with my umbrella and the tickets. Dennis had told her she was going on a super-secret spy paper drop, and she was looking rather pleased with herself for having completed a successful mission.  As soon as she made the hand-off, she turned around and ran all the way back home.

I have to say it again: I'm really loving the independence that the kids are gaining here.  I wondering how long I'll have to wait until I can send them to the store for a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.

The opening ceremonies, in which volunteers rolled the
biggest-name athletes around the stadium on little
wheeled couches. That's Jamacia's Asafa Powell, who
stopped in front of our section and joked around with the
fans: he's an insanely good 100-meter runner, but tonight he
lost to his compatriot Yohan Blake.

I made it back to the track in fine time, and only missed a few of the amateur events at the very beginning. I even arrived in time to receive my free collectible plastic cup and solar-powered flashlight. I also got to grab a standing place just one row back from the railing: an amazing view of some amazing athletes.

As I walked in the stadium, I was amused to see that they had official on-site gambling, in which you can bet not only on the race, but also the winning times.  There was a long, long line for that booth.  It's only the second time I've seen people place bets on track and field, the first being some creepy characters quietly running an impromptu bookie station at the Ohio State Track & Field finals, taking bets on which high-school kids would win their races. People will gamble on anything.

France surrenders

I'll keep the rest of this post short and spare you having to listen to me geek out about track stars.  But I promise you, it was fun.  

The rain stopped just after I collected my umbrella.  And I loved my seats, especially since, when the winners took their victory laps, the friendliest of them stopped and signed autographs in our section.  I was standing next to a trio of high-school girls, and it was so cute, watching them squeal and kiss their signed programs.

As I said, I was standing near the pole vaulting. The women were competing
tonight, and I got to watch Jennifer Suhr win the event. U! S! A!

Suhr was the only female athlete who signed autographs: I
think she may have done this for our section because we
spent all night cheering for her.

We were some very enthusiastic track fans.  The the signs rimming the stadium were metal, and in both standing room sections, people banged away on them every time an athlete ran by. I spent a lot of the night coveting other peoples' ear plugs.

Always my favorite race: the 400m Männer

I was also standing very near the water pit for the steeple chase. It was
hard to get a good photo, though: there were about a dozen professional
photographers crouched in front of the water, also trying to get those
dramatic shots.

The start of the 100 m run: before each race, they preceded the starting pistol with a melodramatic heartbeat, played
through the stadium speakers.

Go team!

The evening ended with a 4 x 100 meter relay.  America was favored to place second (according to the Sporttip odds), but somehow Switzerland, pumped by their home-field advantage, placed third in front of America, behind Jamaica and Great Britain, to the extreme joy of everyone in the stadium except for me.

It was their big win for the night...although now that I'm aware of the national sport of Steinstossen, I'm wondering why Switzerland doesn't generally do better at shot put.

Anyway, I stayed until the very end of the night, and got home easily. Since it was late, I decided to stick to trams and buses, but because of the special event, the city was running a constant stream of "E" ("extra") trams running directly from the stadium to the Hauptbahnhof: unexpectedly convenient.  Thanks, Zürich!

I don't know if this could possibly be interesting to anyone except for me, but if you'd like to see a little cheesy montage of the event, it's available at the Diamond League website.