Sweden has currently an unusual amount of very good athletes, Carolina Klüft in heptathlon, Susanna Kallur 100 m hurdles, Stefan Holm high jump, Johan Wissman 400m and Kajsa Bergqvist high jump amongst others. Because of this the World Championship in Athletics has been dominating the sport pages in Swedish papers the past weeks. This Championship was held in Osaka, Japan this year. As it happend I went there on business the same day it started.
When I booked tickets to go to a customer site in Kyoto, near Osaka, I was totally oblivious about the fact that there was a Championship coming at all. A colleague, who was also going to Kyoto, pointed this out to me. He suggested that we should try to go there one night and I thought, yes, why not when we are in the area. Of course we just talked about it and never got around to actually arranging tickets.
When I arrived I called another colleague who lives in Kyoto. We arranged to meet up for dinner and he also asked if I didn’t wanted to come along to Osaka the next day because they had an extra ticket. Ok, I said, why not. So all of a sudden I had a ticket and to the best day of all, when Carolina Klüft was going to defend the gold medal in heptathlon. And of course she did! A very good day for a Swede be here! I got some bitter comments about it from jealous colleagues back home…
I have never visited such a big stadium before, it took 70000 people. It was not completely full but probably a good 60000 people were present at the end. It was amazing how, when it was time for the 100 m final, 60000 people became totally quiet and as soon as they start running made an impressive amount of noise.
The picture shows the chaos when Tyson Gay came around our side of the stadium after winning 100 m.
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