World Athletics has announced contenders for COVID Inspiration Award

World Athletics has announced the Herculis Wanda Diamond League meeting in Monaco, the Ultimate Garden Clash and the World Athletics Half Marathon Championships in Gdynia as the nominations for the special COVID Inspiration Award.

The international governing body revealed the award aims to recognise event organisations in a year of unprecedented challenges, roadblocks and disruptions brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

The three events were nominated to show the organisers efforts to meet those challenges and provide competitive opportunities for athletes and entertaining events for fans around the world.

"Necessity has been the mother of invention for all of us in this pandemic year and we have seen some really creative initiatives and programmes from our athletes and our event organisers, who have had to reinvent their operations and surmount huge obstacles in order to provide competition for our athletes and fans, which is the lifeblood of our sport," Sebastian Coe, World Athletics President, said.

"We wanted to recognise their enormous resilience and creativity this year by presenting this special award to one of those events that have been exceptionally innovative this year."

The World Athletics Council selected the three nominations.

The Herculis Wanda Diamond League meeting in Monaco was put forward with World Athletics claiming the event overcame unprecedented public health and safety concerns, global travel restrictions and painful budget cuts to stage their annual competition.

The event marked the start of the heavily interrupted Diamond League season on 14 August and saw Uganda's Joshua Cheptegei break the men’s 5,000 metres world record in front of a crowd of 5,000 spectators.

The event featured 132 athletes, including 13 reigning world champions.

A total of 36 countries participated in the event despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, with 14 world-leading performances achieved at the meeting.

Of those 14 performances, 11 remained the year’s best performances at the end of the season.

posted Monday November 9th
by Michael Pavitt