Gezahegne Abera (ETH) wins the 2000 Olympic Games marathon title (© Getty Images)
Today, in Edmonton, the Organising Committee of the 8th IAAF World Championships in Athletics will celebrate the one hundredth day before the inauguration of the greatest sports event of the year, on 3 August.
To mark the occasion, the organizers have invited the people of Edmonton to congregate in front of the City Hall where there will be an exhibition of high jumping in the fountain area. At this time, the Seiko Countdown Clock will be started, ticking away the hours to the start of the World Championships.
This initiative of the Edmonton 2001 Athletic Foundation is designed particularly to underline the importance of the first staging in North America of the Championships for the Province of Alberta and the whole of Canada.
Around 3,000 athletes from more than 200 countries will participate in the World Championships, which will be broadcast over the ten days of competition to an estimated audience of over four billion viewers across the five continents.
A particularly important agreement was signed in recent weeks between the IAAF and ABC/ESPN for live and delayed broadcast of coverage of both Edmonton and the 2003 World Championships in Paris and other major athletics events over the coming three years, throughout the United States of America.
Proof that the World Championships in Athletics are eagerly awaited by Canadians generally and the citizens of Edmonton in particular, can be found in the huge number of people who have offered to work as volunteers and the ever-increasing demand for tickets. The forecast is that the Championships will play to a full house.
Contrary to tradition, the first athletes to compete in the 8th IAAF World Championships will be the marathon runners. In exactly 100 days, at 6.45 pm, local time, the starting pistol will fire and, not much more than two hours later, the first World Champion of this new century and new millennium will be crowned in Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium.
