MONACO, 16 September 2003 — The best of times, the worst of times.

Echoing Charles Dickens in “A Tale of Two Cities”, USA Track & Field chief executive Craig Masback summoned an apt image to describe his team’s display at last month’s Paris World Championships.

On the broader canvas the description could apply to the state of international athletics after the two-day world final at the weekend and 11 months before the Athens Olympics.

Before last month’s Paris championships, International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) President Lamine Diack sounded a somber note when he said athletics had no right to remain the central sport of the Games.

A key theme of the pre-championship IAAF congress was the need to promote the sport’s champions at a time when television sports channels are saturated with tennis, golf and, above all, soccer.

Twice Olympic 1,500 meters champion Seb Coe, said Hicham El Guerrouj, was probably the best middle distance runner of all time. But added his children would not recognize the four times world 1,500 champion and world record holder. El Guerrouj was at Monaco’s Stade Louis II for the season-ending world athletics final but did not run because of a cold.

He still finished as men’s overall champion through a complicated points system which highlighted one of the problems facing administrators striving to make the grand prix circuit and the Golden League series instantly accessible to casual observers of the sport, i.e. equating performances in different disciplines.

Is South African high jumper Hestrie Cloete the best women athlete of the year? She successfully defended her world title and could break Stefka Kostadinova’s 16-year-old world high jump record.

Cloete won the award by five points from Sweden’s world heptathlon champion Carolina Kluft, who did not compete in Monaco after becoming only the third woman to score more than 7,000 points with an unforgettable two-day tour de force in Paris.

Then there is Britain’s Paula Radcliffe, who shattered her world marathon record in London, missed the World Championships because of injury and illness, before setting a world five km road best at the weekend.

And who could have done more than Maria Mutola, who won $1,000,000 after finishing first in the six Golden League 800 meteres women’s races?

Masback appropriated Dickens’s opening paragraph in his epic tale of the French revolution to describe a championships revived for the United States in Paris on the final day by three relay teams.

J.J. Johnson, anchorman on the severely weakened 4x100 squad, ran down Briton Dwain Chambers in the straight for the gold medal in one of the performances of the championships.

The crowds at the Stade de France turned up in large numbers and the atmosphere on the penultimate day when Christine Arron led their women’s 4x100 team to victory over the United States and Eunice Barber won the long jump was spine-tingling.

Lobinger Faces

Sanction for Mooning

German pole vaulter Tim Lobinger faces sanctions for baring his buttocks to the crowd at the world athletics finals in Monaco at the weekend, the German Athletics Federation (DLV) said in Berlin yesterday.

“It was an unsportsmanlike behavior which can not be tolerated,” DLV president Clemens Prokop said of Lobinger’s gesture. The athlete bared his buttocks to the crowd, which included members of Monaco’s royal family, after winning the pole vault on Saturday.

The IAAF, athletics’ governing body, said the athlete could be fined $5,000 but no sanction had been decided yet. The DLV said it was also considering action.