Patrick Magyar is hiding. Thursday had been a busy day, with press conferences and media commitments from dawn until the light of the Swiss early evening began to fade, and he needed to make one last phone call. So he went somewhere no one would look for him: inside Zürich’s new Letzigrund Stadium.

After two minutes, Magyar was forced to admit defeat. As he is approached for further Press questions and late requests for spare tickets. “You see, they have found me,” said the meeting director of the Weltklasse, the meeting which gets the Golden League underway again after an eight-week hiatus which, of course, included the IAAF World Championships in Osaka. Weltklasse remains the hottest sporting ticket in Switzerland.

Now, barely a week after the world’s top athletes had finished competing in Japan, they are back in Europe, with three of them continuing to battle for a share of the $1 million Golden League jackpot and others - as is the custom with the richest single day athletics meeting in the world - in the hunt for top prizes, including the new $140,000 Zürich Trophy relay race.

Magyar quickly dealt with his latest enquiry, and then took stock of Friday night’s meeting. “At our press conference earlier today, many journalists suggested that our date is a bad spot, coming after the World Championships,” Magyar says.

“But I don’t agree,” said the man who was deputy meeting director in Zürich for seven years before working on the global marketing strategies for both athletics and Fifa, the Swiss-based world football federation.

“I think the model for this meeting is that it is full of re-matches and revenge duels, so we are in a very good spot, coming straight after the championships,” Magyar says.

“Of course, it does not make it easier when the championships are in Osaka, or next year are in China with the Beijing Olympics, the time differences and the travel will make it tough for the athletes competing here. Often, they need something like three weeks for acclimatisation.

“But we now have a new stadium purpose built for fast times in the 100, the 200 and the relays.” Magyar explains that the introduction of the Zürich Trophy is “to thank the people and the city for providing us with this beautiful stadium, and to launch our own flagship event.”

Magyar says: “For many years, we admired Wilfried Meert in Brussels for having the courage every year to stage a top-level 10,000m, and we thought that we should have an event, too, which everyone associates with Zürich.

“The curves of the track at our new Letzigrund Stadium are so wide, it is perfect for the relays, and we think that the public and the athletes will love the concept of national teams, in national colours, battling it out. We believe that with $140,000 prize money, it will be the highest paid event on the circuit.

“We have the United States, Jamaica, Great Britain, Poland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy taking part, with the Americans having exactly the same running order as won the gold medal in Osaka.”

Magyar avoids mentioning any single athlete, or single event, simply because, he feels, that he cannot. As the meeting director of an event long renowned as the “world championships in a single evening”, Magyar has managed to put together events, such as the women’s High Jump, Pole Vault and Javelin, where he has the top six finishers from Osaka in his line-up.

“The technical events here this year are second to none,” Magyar says, “it would be difficult to make them any better.”

The old 22,000-capacity Letzigrund was famous for the spectators being tightly packed around the track, often banging their hands on the advertising hoardings to drive on competitors in the distance races. The new stadium will have 20 per cent more people inside, privileged to witness the world’s top athletes in action, and Magyar hopes will be generating just as much excitement.

And much of that excitement could centre on the three women who remain in the hunt for a share of the $1 million Golden League jackpot - Michelle Perry (100m Hurdles) and Yelena Isinbayeva (Pole Vault), who both won their second World titles in Osaka; and Sanya Richards, who in the 400m will be facing the new World champion, Britain’s Christine Ohuruogu, for the first time.

Magyar could hardly have planned things better for Zürich - though as someone who worked on setting up the Golden League 10 years ago, he probably did.

Steven Downes for the IAAF