2009 interview - click here
 

2009 interview - click here

2009 interview - click here

(Former Director Gérard Rousselle: 2007 interview - click here; 2008 interview - click here) 
2009 interview - Click here

2009 interview - click here

2009 interview -

Our crown jewels – Kim and Tia - have gone. Our coming stars - the Borlee twins - are injured. Not one of our athletes won a medal at the World Championships in Berlin. Our corporate packages are being squeezed by the economic downturn. And, on top of all that, they wanted to turn our track into a football stadium.

All of these issues have jumped up to test Wilfried Meert, the longstanding director of the Belgacom Ivo Van Damme Memorial meeting. But you don’t get to survive 33 years as head of such a prestigious occasion as Van Damme without knowing how to ride out the problems.
And, for Meert, that means more than half his life in the role.

The 64-year-old Meert can boast a ninth successive sell-out year despite so many cards being dealt against him. Thanks to a brand that holds a special place in the hearts of the Belgian public, there will be 47,000 spectators packed into the King Baudouin Stadium tomorrow evening.

Attempts in some quarters to move athletics out of the stadium have been repelled and a new Mondo track is in place. “Everything has been redone – the jumping zones, the throwing zones, everything,” Meert said. Although one minor meeting has been held on the track, the international stars are experiencing it for the first time.

“There have been athletes here since Saturday – Asafa Powell, Jeremy Wariner, Sanya Richards – who came straight from Zurich to Brussels,” Meert said. “They have been practising on the track and they came spontaneously me to say that it is a fantastic track.

“For us, this is very important because, from the football world, there have been manoeuvres to build a new stadium, people saying ‘can’t they have their own stadium somewhere with a 25,000 capacity?’ I had to lobby for months to say we are the only ones to fill that stadium. Football doesn’t fill the stadium unless it is a decisive match. Then they fill it, otherwise it is 25,000 to 30,000 people, whereas we have been sold out for nine years in a row. Then some ministers said ‘we are not going to break down the stadium, we are going to renew the track’, so now the athletes have to prove that this was a good decision.”

The retirement, at the end of last season, of European 100/200m champion Kim Gevaert and Olympic High Jump champion Tia Hellebaut might have seen ticket sales fall short of capacity – but no. “We knew it was going to be more difficult because Kim stopped – she was immensely popular in this country – and Tia stopped which was a blow for us because it was expected that, being Olympic champion, she would go on for at least one more year,” Meert said.

“We lost our two crown jewels. We knew this was going to be difficult because some people are going to say ‘I’ve seen all the career of Kim, why should I go one more time to the stadium?’ Plus there is the economical crisis – many companies that were buying tickets no longer had the budget to do so. So we said ‘this year maybe we will not be sold out’. We were selling tickets quite well but we were 4000 to 5000 behind on what we had sold at the same time last year. So we were thinking that this year we would be ‘only’ 40,000, not 47,000. But, after Usain Bolt’s first World record in Berlin (100m, 9.58sec) all of a sudden it picked up and we sold out two days ago.”

Other than the fourth place achieved by the men’s 4x400m team in Berlin, no Belgian athlete placed in the top eight at the World Championships. “This has been an exceptional year, not only because of the two who disappeared but the two who were supposed to replace them – the Borlee twins – are injured,” Meert said.

“One kid (Jonathan) won the NCAA in a fantastic time, 44.78, and the brother (Kevin) last year ran 44.88 (and was part of the fourth-placed team in Berlin). But they are both out with stress fractures, although logically next year they will be back and they will fight for the medals in Barcelona (at the European Championships). That means next year, after Barcelona, if one or both win medals, we are up and running again. All sports have their ups and downs. I remember when we had Vincent Rousseau and William Van Dyck – they were heroes at the time – and the first time we had Kim run here she was last and the second time she was last again, a young girl completely lost.”

Picking his potential highlights ahead of the meeting, Meert said: “It would be stupid to say that we are not waiting for Bolt – the whole world is talking about Usain, this country is talking about Usain. Yesterday I asked him to inaugurate officially with the Lord Mayor the new track, which he did with great charisma.

“He has chosen the 200m – he knows we have fantastic curves. I have to double-check this but I don’t think there is one meeting in the world that has more sub 20 times than this one. He asked what the stadium record is and it is a tough one – Tyson Gay’s 19.79. That’s really fast which means that Usain is really going for it.

“But Gay against Powell in the 100m is a great race and, for the women’s 100m, the best in the World are together here – Shelly-Ann Fraser, Kerron Stewart, Carmelita Jeter, Veronica Campbell-Brown, Sherone Simpson coming back. I think it is the best field I have ever had in the women’s 100m.

“Yelena (Isinbayeva, Pole Vault) is again motivated after what happened in Berlin, Blanca Vlasic is in good shape (High Jump), Kenenisa Bekele (5000m) wants to run fast, Gelete Burka (2000m) wants to show something after the frustration of what happened to her in Berlin (tripped and fell in the 1500m). So there are many events in which something can happen.”

Van Damme marks the end of the life of the Golden League, to be replaced next year by the IAAF Diamond League. “The success of the Golden League was mainly for the outsiders, not the insiders,” Meert opined. “For the insiders, each meeting kept its own identity but, for the outsiders, it was a marketing tool, like the jackpot was a marketing tool.

“On the inside we say these are the 10 winners who go to the next meet then, after the next meet, seven are left, but the man in the street does not talk about that. He sees the last picture, the jackpot, the gold bars. Then, all of a sudden, a teenage Kenyan girl (Pamela Jelimo, 2008) wins $1m and people start talking about that – and the Diamond League I think will be the same.

“But there will be more winners and you might create more interest in more countries when athletes from that country are still in the running for diamonds.” All the better for Meert if one or more is Belgian.

David Powell for the IAAF