IT IS, Geoff Wightman admits, much like that curse which befalls wedding planners and party organisers everywhere. Seventeen months in the making, the clock is ticking down with ever greater ferocity towards Sunday's World Cross Country Championships, that fateful day in Monaco in November 2006 when Edinburgh landed the event now but a distant memory amid the 11th-hour tweaks which must be hastily made.
Mid-afternoon yesterday, Scottish Athletics chief executive Wightman had a simple analysis of his lot. "Frantic," he said, despite a carefully constructed master plan which has been implemented in collaboration with city authorities, the IAAF's scrut
ineers, and most critically, his in-house collaborators, all of whom have been racking up that unpaid overtime in the collective cause.
All week, track-suited tourists have been touching down to take up residence ahead of their endeavours in Holyrood Park. "We don't actually know as yet the exact number of teams who will be here," Wightman, pictured below, admits. "I think, at this moment, it will be just shy of 70." Not all gave notice of their arrival. Reigning champion Zersenay Tadesse was spotted last night on a wander, having made impromptu travel plans. His rivals, calamity notwithstanding, will all be in situ by this evening.
What is certain is that the final start list in the senior and junior races will be larger both than last year's 470-strong contingent in Mombassa and much greater than the 360 competitors, from just 27 nations, who took part when the Championships were held in Bellahouston Park exactly 30 years ago. The quotas vary heavily. Azerbaijan is sending just one representative, while Qatar, its athletes used as ambassadors for its largesse, will field a dozen in the senior men's race alone.
"We've only today been getting a few of the last-minute issues resolved, most of them to do with making sure all the athletes who want to be here and who intend to be here actually get here without any hitches," Wightman outlines.
Fortunately, the recent changes to the immigration rules which made it all the more complex for overseas sports people to hop into Britain have not seen anyone turned away. Cherry Alexander, Wightman's designated point woman on such matters, has nonetheless become intimately familiar with the murky and mysterious machinations of the Foreign Office.
"Although you encourage federations to apply earlier, a lot don't select their team until late on, so they can't necessarily sort the visa paperwork until then," he admits. "You have athletes travelling on brand new passports and that process takes time. So there's a few last-minute hurdles. But nothing we could have sorted by doing anything differently."
Other solutions have been easier to find, such as extra goodie bags and a last-minute accreditation request from the UK Sports Minister, Gerry Sutcliffe. Yet the heart of Wightman's original bid document incorporated one specific mission which cannot be fulfilled until the clock has ticked to absolute zero. To put on a truly impressive race, which will inspire the present-day greats to fresh heights and the stars of tomorrow to follow in their mud-strewn footsteps.
It helps that there is, in prospect, an extraordinary re-match between Tadesse and Kenenisa Bekele, whom he dethroned 12 months ago. However, the bar has been set as high as possible to ensure that Scotland's brief foray onto the centre of athletics' global stage touches all those involved.
"The main thing is taking care of the 20,000 people we're expecting on the course, irrespective of the weather because there is the opportunity, particularly with the re-match of Tadesse versus Bekele, to just put on some classic athletics," Wightman states, with discernible excitement. "If the ex-pat Africans turn up in big numbers, if the schools turn up in big numbers, and fans from around the UK come and make a lot of noise, we can really redefine what constitutes a top-class meeting.
"You have the intimacy of a cross country event which brings crowds and runners closer than any other discipline. You have a two-kilometre loop where people can stroll across to different vantage points. We have live screens around the course. We've got a £500 prize for the most enthusiastic school in the Adopt A Nation programme we've been running.
"It's really incredibly lively. It's free. And we just want people to pitch up, see what all the fuss is about, and enjoy it."
• MO FARAH faces a testing head-to-head with top American Alan Webb in the Carlsbad 5,000 metres road race on 6 April.
The European 5,000m silver medallist has accepted an invitation to compete at the California venue – even though he is carefully choosing his competitions in Olympic year.
Farah remains adamant nothing must interfere with his preparations for Beijing, which currently are going well after a hamstring problem that
prevented him defending his European Cross Country title last December – and he is also an absentee from this Sunday's Championships in Edinburgh.
But Farah – the leading European in the recent World Indoor 3,000m final – said: "The Olympics remain my goal and I cannot afford to pick up an injury by competing in Edinburgh."
The Carlsbad course is acknowledged as being one of the fastest in the world, with six men's and women's world records achieved there since 1986.
That suggests Farah can challenge his British best performance of 13 minutes 29.7 seconds, which he achieved 15 months ago in Stranolar, Ireland.
The full article contains 931 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
