Mottram saves the worlds

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There were plenty of reasons why the World Athletics Championships slipped under the radar over the last two weeks. Lost among a myriad of higher-profile sports, the world’s best track and field athletes competed largely unnoticed by the sporting public in this country, who have been swept away by golden performances in the pool in Montreal and an Ashes series of unrivalled tension. Not to mention the Bledisloe Cup and the business end of the footy season in both major codes.

The timeslot wasn’t overly-friendly either. As if the athletics fanatics of this country needed to know that their sport is struggling for a profile, SBS, the champion of under-appreciated sports, pushed their timeslot back to 2:30am, and often later, to accommodate the goliath that is Australian cricket.

Even the most passionate of sports fans would have struggled to sit through 90 overs of absorbing Ashes action and then keep the eyes open for the best of the athletics from Helsinki. The Scandinavian weather wasn’t much help, with storms plaguing much of the night sessions and keeping the faithful up even later into the morning.

The action extended past the newspaper deadline here in Australia and meant that most of the news was well-dated by the time it made it into print or on TV the next day. When it did make the news, the impression was of a disappointing Australian effort.

Australian Athletics is always rated as the poorer cousin to other sports, in particular swimming. In a golden era, Australia performed as well on the track as it did in the pool, but that era has well gone. The reality is now, saying Australia had a disappointing world Aths campaign is probably equivalent to saying Ethiopia had a poor swim champs.

The world of athletics has changed dramatically in the professional era, with the US College circuit providing a never-ending breeding ground for the sprinters and field athletes an endless flow of long distance runners coming out of East and Northern Africa. The recent move by gulf states to poach African runners to ‘buy’ golden moments is at the more insidious end of the spectrum, but it is a sign of how poorly the world’s best athletes are rewarded financially if they are willing to give up the honour of representing the country of their birth for money.

Australia’s athletes aren’t rewarded with the lucrative endorsement contracts of other elite sportspeople. They participate more for love than money, and while Australia boasts world class training and medical facilities, the depth of talent isn’t there to deliver constant results. Still, Craig Mottram won bronze in Helsinki and Patrick Johnson and John Steffenson made the finals of the 200m and 400m respectively. All fine efforts.

Occasionally, someone stands up and delivers, a Cathy Freeman or Jana Pittman. From the solitude of year-round training sessions, they are catapulted into the national spotlight, in particular around Olympic time. Freeman handled that superbly, Pittman not so well. That is a challenge which much confronts Mottram, Australia’s only medallist in Helsinki, at next year’s Commonwealth Games and possibly the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Mottram’s effort to finish third in the 5000m was perhaps the biggest achievement of any Australian sportsperson in the last month, but it has been recorded as a positive blot on an otherwise disappointing world championships. While Jessicah Schipper, Leisel Jones and Grant Hackett were excellent in Montreal and McGrath and Warne were great in England, Mottram was inspirational in Helsinki.

Pulling himself off the canvas with 50m to go, he overhauled the reigning world champion to snatch bronze and finish within three metres of the gold medal. The time wasn’t flash, but the race was run to suit the African runners, who can sprint quickly at the end of their races. Mottram took them on at their own game, and came away with a medal which he treasured as much as any gold. He, as much as Ricky Ponting, Shane Warne, Brett Lee and Glenn McGrath did at Old Trafford, embodies the Australian will to succeed, but for the mean time, he’ll have to wait for his back page.