BACK IN THE RUNNING
PHOTOS GETTY
JB Priestley wrote of Gateshead in An English Journey that, “No true civilisation could have produced such a town,” ramming home his point by noting that it appeared to have been designed “by an enemy of the human race”. On a chilly grey afternoon standing in a car park next to the Felling bypass, the busy dual carriageway that points the way towards neighbouring Newcastle, the temptation is to concede that Priestley might have had a point.
The red-brick terraces stare down bleakly from on top of the windswept hill, budget supermarket Netto beckons uninvitingly from across the road and a precariously secured flag lashes rattily against a helpless pole. The flag carries the logo of the Blue Square Premier League in which Gateshead’s football team plies its trade. If you want the Premiership, you have to cross the Tyne.
Open your eyes a little wider, though, and it’s clear that 76 years on from when Priestley penned its obituary Gateshead is very much alive. Its pioneering contemporary architecture – Antony Gormley’s iconic Angel of the North, Norman Foster’s performing arts venue the Sage Gateshead, and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art – have given it a strutting sense of self-confidence. And then there is the stadium this car park serves, the one which has propelled a blue-collar town into blue-chip company this summer.
It may be home to a modest non-league football team, but the primary purpose of the Gateshead International Stadium is to stage athletics meetings, and being chosen to host a Diamond League event in July has put the town in somewhat more elite company.
One of 14 sites chosen for the inaugural season of a £4.3m series which pays the best athletes on the planet in four-carat diamonds, Gateshead sticks out like a frisbee in a discus stack on a list that includes New York, London and Rome. But it’s not the first time it has punched above its weight.
Ever since it hosted its first international event in 1961, which featured an impressive cast list including Olympic 800m champion Peter Snell from New Zealand, the arena has demonstrated its pulling power and its ability to deliver drama. There’s a homeliness in its cosy proximity that bigger and brasher venues cannot match.
Jonathan Edwards, the 2000 Olympics gold medallist and current world record holder, spent most of his waking hours at the stadium, training to be the best triple jumper Britain has produced.
“It has a lot of history. It’s been a great venue for track and field for the past 30 years – one of the very best,” explains Edwards, who lives nearby. “It’s changed a lot over the years. There’s been a lot of investment, but to me it still feels like a second home. It’s a place with a fabulous atmosphere. For a triple jumper, performing so close to the main stand is a wonderful experience. It’s not a flashy venue, but it has staged some pretty special nights in British athletics history and that gives it its own resonance. You don’t get that same sense of tradition in, say, Sheffield or Birmingham.”
For Edwards, the European Cup win in 1989 springs to mind as a personal highlight, but there have been many, many others over the years. There was the time Barcelona Olympic champion Linford Christie saw off Carl Lewis in a massively hyped head to head over 100m in 1993, or when Jamaican sprinter Asafa Powell equalled the 100m world record in a scorching 9.77 seconds in 2006.
In between, Yelena Isinbayeva broke the world pole-vault record twice, the first time in the last event of the 2003 British Grand Prix when 9,000 of the 10,000-strong crowd had already gone home; the second 12 months later in front of a full house.
All in all, four world records have been broken at the stadium, of which the most poignant remains the very first. It was set by the north-east long-distance legend Brendan Foster, now the driving force behind the Great North Run, who smashed the world 3,000m record by 2.4 seconds to deliver on a drunken bet.
“It all began when I was given a civic reception by Gateshead Council for breaking the two-mile world record at Crystal Palace,” recalls Foster, who ran for Gateshead Harriers and remains the club president to this day. “I’d heard they were putting in a new track so I said that if they did I’d go and break another world record on it. You know how it is when you’ve had a few drinks – you promise the world. That was in December of 1973, and by the following April the council had decided to have a recreation department. I got the job at interview, took over in the July, and a month later kept my promise about the world record!”
In a flowerbed by the sprint start stands a modest stone memorial to Stan Long, Foster’s old coach, who died in 2005. Long, a former race walker, was the founder of the Gateshead borough schools challenge commonly known as the Lollipop Games because each competitor received a lollipop for competing.
Remarkably, two British Olympians, Angela Piggford and Jill Hunter, were discovered through the games, carrying on a local running tradition that stretches way back to the 19th century when Jack White, “the Gateshead Clipper”, used to give opponents head starts in handicap races and still pick up the £50 wagers. White established records that lasted 50 years.
The DNA strand threads through to more recent local heroes including Edwards and Steve Cram, of nearby Jarrow & Hebburn, who once worked as an attendant at the stadium. British athletics is less densely populated with superstars at present, and the turn-out was disappointing last year at the rain-hit British Grand Prix. The hope is that the Diamond League will restore the sparkle, but Gateshead will be on trial as much as the athletes this year.
“It’s a huge coup for Gateshead to stage its own Diamond League meeting. It really puts Gateshead on the map being alongside places like Rome and Zurich, and it’s great for people across the North to be able to see world-class athletes without having to travel down to London,” says Edwards. “The council have invested in sport in an exemplary way and this is a great reward for their commitment. But the meetings haven’t been sold out lately and the Diamond League will look at the degree to which the public support the event. If they don’t, it could be vulnerable.”
The Diamond League is athletics’ latest attempt to provide meaningful season-long competition. While the major contests, such as the European Championships in Spain at the end of July, are the suns around which the sport orbits, the rest of the season has been unsatisfactory.
Out went the Golden League and, as a reward for committing to an expanded league through central contracts, the elite names have been free to negotiate their own deals with individual venues to decide when and where they compete. This means that although Usain Bolt may well choose Britain’s other Diamond League event (at Crystal Palace, 13-14 August) rather than Gateshead, other stars will head for the north-east.
“A lot of the athletes who compete in the Diamond League travel all over the world and, for them, Gateshead will be just another stadium, but it has always had a special atmosphere for me,” says Los Angeles Olympic marathon medallist Charlie Spedding from Bishop Auckland, County Durham, who watched from a grass bank the day Foster set his record. “Having trained there on wet, windy, winter nights, to be there with the crowds in with high expectations of their local runners was very exciting.”
“Unfortunately we don’t have local heroes at the moment who can do the sort of thing Brendan Foster did, but the crowds are still appreciative,” says Spedding. “I’m delighted we have two Diamond League events in this country as the Olympics approaches, and for the north-east of England to have one of them with all the world-class athletes it will bring is very, very special.”
The UKA Aviva British Grand Prix will take place in Gateshead International Stadium on 10 July. www.diamondleaguegateshead.com
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