Times are of some significance in popular culture. After midnight is when “we let it all hang out” – according to J.J. Cale, at least. In myriad ditties the dawn heralds the beginning of a new day.
Between midnight and the dawn comes 4am. Not a propitious time. In Dylan’s Hurricane, the song about the boxer Rubin Carter, “four in the morning and they haul Rubin in” marks the start of a process leading to a wrongful murder conviction. Less consequentially, it’s a time for unrequited love. As Faron Young had it: “It’s four in the morning and what’s more the dawning just woke up the wanting in me.”
In terms of big nights out, 4am is about the latest you can claim with any plausibility to have come in ‘last night’ as opposed to crept in ‘next morning’.
Anyway, four in the morning Friday 6 September was the time I woke up to tune in to the live stream of Zurich’s Weltklasse Diamond League. I’d gone to bed the previous night with vague thoughts of perhaps catching one or two events live, or perhaps not, then the rest on delay. Instead, I found myself stumbling out of bed just as the meeting got into full swing. Maybe it was a hangover from those early mornings during Paris24?
Now streaming is a great thing. It’s changed the way we follow athletics meetings, especially here in the southern hemisphere. Where once we waited impatiently for our weekly, or monthly, northern hemisphere publications to lob into our mailboxes for news and results, now we can watch them live as they happen.
As with the whole internet thing itself, that was the brief, happy interlude before streaming services realised they could monetise coverage. We will happily (?) pay for things we value and athletics fans value few things more highly than the Diamond League meetings and few Diamond League meetings as highly as Zurich.
Content providers became the trolls under the bridges of live streaming. Pay them before you get permission to cross. It’s a smallish price to pay even if most of us aren’t happy about it.
So, there we were in a lovely little hotel in Launceston at the conclusion of a week’s touring following the Australian cross-country championships. The championships were pretty impressive, despite some of the coldest weather experienced in quite some time. At least conditions were fair to reasonable for the two senior titles. Fortunately, most of our post -chaps time was spent on the east coast of Tasmania, where the weather is considerably milder. We saw some sun most every day.
And then I woke up just in time to catch the majority of the Zurich DL live. What could possibly go wrong with that? Plenty, as it turned out. Pretty well everything from the moment I logged into my streaming service.
First off, the weather in Zurich was pretty dodgy. Summer rain and thunderstorms are often experienced there; one year the meeting was almost blown away by gale force winds. Rain considerably diminished performances in the women’s high jump – won by Yaroslava Mahuchikh from Nicola Olyslagers in a mediocre 1.96, in the men’s pole vault where Mondo Duplantis could go no higher than an almost earthbound 5.82, and in almost every other field event.
Nina Kennedy must have been blessing the foresight of organisers in staging the women’s event at the city’s main train station the night before. She won for the third year in a row with a clearance of 4.87.
Intermittent rain is one thing. Intermittent pictures another. For reason’s unfathomable (to me, anyway), my streaming content kept dropping out at regular intervals. Maybe everyone in the hotel was trying to watch at once? Far from seamless, the coverage was stuck in an endless loop of error message, restart (missing several vital seconds) and repeat.
This wasn’t as bad on the middle-distance events. I saw pretty much all of Yared Nuguse’s upset win over Jakob Ingebrigtsen in the 1500 and Beatrice Chebet’s near-miss at the 5000 world record, but in the 200 Kenny Bednarek was going to hang on to beat Olympic champ Letsile Tebogo with 20 metres to go but one error-restart loop later the Botswanan man had got up by two-hundredths of a second, which I only knew because he was standing there holding a bunch of flowers when the picture came back.
Then the gremlins started playing games with me. In the women’s 100 hurdles local hero Ditaji Kambundji was dq-ed for a false start before being allowed to run under protest (after which the disqualification was upheld). The picture remained intact throughout the whole drawn-out process before dropping out again as soon as the field was back in their blocks.
Over many years I’ve moved heaven and earth to get to the Zurich meeting and been rewarded by watching many world record performances first-hand. I’m not sure that 2024’s livestream lived up to any of those experiences, but it did prove to me that a little bit of Zurich is a lot better than none at all.
