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News - 08.07.2011

Awaiting Usain...

Despite some rather alarmist weather forecasts, it was an overcast sky but not a drop of rain that greeted the 2011 edition of the Meeting Areva, the eighth stage of the Samsung Diamond League, in Paris’ Stade de France. Organised a week earlier than last year, this athletics evening drew the maximum number of spectators in a stadium that can accommodate up to 75,000 seats in athletics configuration, a fact that makes it the largest arena of the 14 which host the Samsung Diamond League meetings. It has to be said that the line-ups on offer were more than enticing, both in the track and field. Indeed the organisers offered athletics fans the opportunity to see France’s top athletes vying with world and Olympic champions in the main athletics disciplines.

The programme was designed to get hotter and hotter over the course of the evening, culminating with the men’s 200m. Among those competing was the star of the meeting, Jamaican Usain Bolt, and the Frenchman Christophe Lemaître, who the local public were hoping to see beat the national record over the distance. Before all that though, there was a fine festival of athletics for the spectators, beginning with the LIFA races, which enable the young athletes of the Ile de France region to experience the thrill of competing in front of the crowds in the Stade de France. After that it was straight into the thick of the action, with the start of the women’s competition and, very soon, the field events. Two of the latter bore witness to the world’s best performances of the year in the javelin and then the triple jump. As such the evening got off to a flying start.

The track events and the performances continued on at a steady pace, with the crowd really behind the French winners in the Stade de France: Mahiedine Mekhissi-Benabbad in the 3,000m steeplechase and Renaud Lavillenie in the men’s pole vault competition, an event organised this year thanks to an exchange with the Birmingham meeting, which was initially set to feature this discipline. However, the high-class sports extravaganza offered, notably by the women’s 100m and the 5,000m, the men’s high jump and the 110m hurdles, in no way escaped the keen eye of athletics fans, whilst every fifteen minutes, the countdown announcing the men’s 200m ticked down on the stadium’s giant screens.

Then the big moment arrived for the 49,174 spectators, namely the 200m to round off the programme and this great evening of sport in style. After a few technical issues with the stopwatch, the starting gun fired and Usain Bolt, still with an easy fluidity in his stride, deprived Christophe Lemaître and a large part of the crowd of the opportunity of seeing another Frenchman taking victory. However, like all the events at the Meeting Areva 2011, it was such a fine spectacle that it was impossible to have anything against the Jamaican…