OSAKA 4 – Breakfast with style – By Jason Henderson, August 25th 2007 – Athletics Weekly

There was only one place to be when it came to watching the men’s marathon at the World Championships in Osaka
IT IS 7am in Osaka and 11pm back in the UK and for the next two hours the Hard Rock Café will act as the temporary epicentre of world athletics.
Inside the Hard Rock Café, a who’s who from the sport enjoy breakfast while watching the action on monitors.

Kip Keino sips an early-morning drink, while a few yards away another supermiler, Seb Coe, grabs his first bite of the day. Journalists and agents mingle and chat before choosing a spot in front of one of the many TV screens available. At roughly halfway everyone dashes outside to watch the athletes whiz by and some then choose to head to the stadium for the finish, while others continue to watch the action back inside with a cup of coffee.

By the time you read this, the athletics epicentre will have moved on and the Hard Rock Café will be full of ‘normal’, non-athletic people again. But for two or three hours on Saturday morning in downtown Osaka, it was the place to be.

The event was a reception staged by the organisers of the World Marathon Majors – a collaboration of the world’s premier 26.2-mile events – and in addition to the above mentioned guests, it was also attended by the race directors of the World Marathon Majors series – Dave Bedford (Flora London Marathon), Mary Wittenberg (ING New York City), Guy Morse (Boston), Mark Milde (real Berlin) and Carey Pinkowski (LaSalleBank Chicago Marathon).

Due to the fact most people had only just flown in to Osaka, the various degrees of jetlag meant that it didn’t feel odd at all to be attending a gathering such as this at the crack of dawn. Everyone’s body clock, after all, was telling them it was mid-afternoon, or late evening, depending on where they had travelled from.

I have always struggled to work out the best place to watch a marathon. Dashing around on metro or Tube stations to catch snippets of the action has never appealed. Watching on television is good, but when you have travelled to the city that is staging the race it somehow seems a travesty when you simply watch it on telly.

Now, though, I have discovered the best way to view a marathon – or a championship marathon at any rate. In future I will definitely try to find out of the World Marathon Majors are staging a reception and if so I’ll make sure I’m there – whatever time of day it is.

By Jason Henderson,
Athletics Weekly
August 25th 2007