Susan's Shanghai Blog - Week 69

We talk alot about the benefits of living in a big city, and one of these is the events that come to the city. Whether it be a golf tournament, the Formula 1 race, or an elite track and field event, we have the opportunity to go to things that just don't happen in Raleigh. This week, it was the IAAF Diamond League track and field event.

I hadn't heard of "Diamond League" (although Tom had), which hold track and field events with the top athletes in the world. Their meet locations inlcude Qatar, China, the US, Italy, Norway, the UK, Switzerland, France, Monaco, Sweden, and Belgium (in 2013). What we found interesting is that not all disciplines compete in each meet. For example, we had women's pole vault but not mens, and mens long jump but not women's.

The Shanghai Stadium was built in 1997 for the 8th National games of the People's Republic of China. It can hold 80,000 people and is one of the largest soccer (football) stadiums in the world. It was also used for the soccer preliminaries in the 2008 Summer Olympics. A tidbit of trivia: according to Wikipedia, the stadium and Shanghai's skyline are used in the opening credits of the sport section on Euronews.

It was really a crappy day with light rain, although the rain stopped after the first set of events. Here are some pictures as we came in, the ladies were warming up for their triple jump event. To the right, you can see the pole vault setup.

Here we pan to the other end, where if you look closely to the left of the 100 sign, you can see the white (foul) line for the long jump and triple jump. The cage that is shown middle-left is for the discus throw. Then next to that is where they do the javelin and then the high jump.

One of the triple jumpers getting ready to start her warm-up run.

These are basically our seats, which were at the curve after the finish line. No matter what race, they always finished here.

You can see how dark it is, and this was at 6pm (you can see the 18:07 on the clock)

They only had one big board (which I find bad) and it was behind us, but we could see it really good to watch replays and things.

We attempted to get some pictures of the events, although some that were not close to us were really hard to get decent pictures of due to the low light levels and the fact that we have a relatively old camera. The first picture you can see one of the triple jumpers (the guy seated in the middle is at the foul line and the jumper is in mid-jump to the right of that) and a pole vaulter.

They had 2 events in advance of the elite athletes, which seemed to be may locals, one race for boys and the other (shown here) for girls.

We had the best view of the high jump, so I got a few better pictures of them. The winner was from Qatar, and it was interesting that he didn't miss on his first try at any height until almost the very end, maybe the one before the final height. We got to watch their warm-up and setup quite closely. Each person walks out a very specific distance and they put tape down on the track. Some of them actually start way out in the actual track itself so they have to time things when there are races going on.

The rest are random pictures through alot of the different events.

You could tell that in a few events, there were rabbits (pacemakers) that dropped out at certain points.