Bidding and Organisation
The IAAF announced on March 25, 2007 at an IAAF Council meeting in Mombasa, Kenya that it had received bids from Turkey and Qatar to host the championships. On November 25, in a Council meeting in Monaco, the IAAF announced that Doha would host the championships. This was the first time that a world athletics championship was held in the Middle-East and the second time the World Indoor Championships was held outside of Europe or North America (after the 1999 Championships in Japan).
The venue for the event was the indoor arena located within Doha's Aspire Zone – the ASPIRE Dome, which has previously hosted indoor athletics for the 2008 Asian Indoor Athletics Championships. The World Indoor Championships was the first of two significant athletics events to take place in Doha in 2010 – the inaugural 2010 IAAF Diamond League will begin with the Qatar Athletic Super Grand Prix meeting in May.
Prior to the championships, the Qatar organising committee held the Doha Indoor Athletics Meeting for Juniors as a test event for the venue. The meeting began on 26 February and featured junior athletes from 11 countries within the region competing in a total of 13 events.
The competition set a new high for the number of nations at the World Indoor Championships: 150 countries sent teams to the championships, with a total of 374 men and 283 women athletes entered to compete.
The competition mascot was an anthropomorphic caracal named Saham – the caracal is a medium-sized cat which is native to the Middle-East. The inclusion of a mascot follows on from the mainstream success of the 2009 World Championships in Athletics mascot – Berlino the Bear.
The IAAF extended live audio and video coverage of the championships to the internet for certain countries, including a deal with IEC in Sports which saw events available live and on-demand via Dailymotion. This was the first deal of its kind for the competition.
Read more about this topic: 2010 IAAF World Indoor Championships
Famous quotes containing the words bidding and/or organisation:
“Practically speaking, the opponents to a reform in Massachusetts are not a hundred thousand politicians at the South, but a hundred thousand merchants and farmers here, who are more interested in commerce and agriculture than they are in humanity, and are not prepared to do justice to the slave and to Mexico, cost what it may. I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, coöperate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is because the body is a machine that education is possible. Education is the formation of habits, a superinducing of an artificial organisation upon the natural organisation of the body.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)