Reporters talk to Allyson Felix ahead of the IAAF World Championships (© Getty Images)
To diligently prepare for many months before delivering on the biggest stage is not the exclusive reserve for the 2000 competing athletes in Beijing; it will also be the same approach adopted by many of the hundreds of reporters present in the Chinese capital for the IAAF World Championships, Beijing 2015.
Jean-Denis Coquard, an athletics writer for the highly respected French daily sports newspaper L’Equipe, will be one of those journalists paid to make sense of the action-packed biennial nine-day competition through the power of words.
It is an event which, as the Frenchman will go on to explain, requires organisation, passion and a love of the unexpected to deliver the best possible results.
Joining L’Equipe back in 1999, Coquard initially worked with the ‘Olympic Groupe’ in which athletics was the principal sport and his first athletics report was on Czech combined-eventer Tomas Dvorak’s decathlon world record at the European Cup in Prague. He later worked as a football writer on the newspaper for five years before he was transferred to the athletics department in 2006.
Since then he has attended most of the sport's biggest events, including the past two summer Olympic Games, and in Beijing he is looking forward to covering what will be his fifth IAAF World Championships.
Due to land in the Chinese capital three days before the competition starts, he will be expected to work gruelling 16-hour days during his time in Beijing. And Coquard has a message for those who believe the life of an athletics journalist travelling overseas is spent sunbathing and sightseeing.
“We often don’t have time to visit the places where we travel,” explains Coquard. “We have very short nights due to the hours we work.”
Coquard’s preparatory work for a World Championships will start well in advance of the event and many will be surprised to learn that he and his team will have approximately 50 stories prepared in advance of the championships on the sport’s star names, the key French athletes and the people around them such as coaches, managers and family.
“These stories are not necessarily written,” he explains. “It will depend on the time schedule. At the London 2012 Olympics because the men’s 100m final took place at 11pm French time and we have a midnight deadline, I had already written in advance a portrait of Bolt – winner and loser – a portrait on Yohan Blake – winner and loser – and I had prepared elements for an interview in both cases. After the 100m final I then had to write the final report and add in the mixed zone questions.”
His days in Beijing, he says, will be broadly divided into two halves. The morning sessions inside the stunning Bird’s Nest Stadium will see Coquard follow the action, pick up quotes in the mixed zone and write stories on either potential winners that evening or for athletes competing the following day. The evening session will follow the similar pattern of watching the action unfold, mixed zone quotes and then conference calls with the boss to determine which stories to write.
“The aim is to bring something new to the reader compared to the web coverage and TV,” he explains. “We need to present a good analysis of the action despite a short time frame to work in.”
Coquard believes being a good athletics writer requires not only an extensive knowledge of the sport and a great contact base, but it also helps to enjoy the buzz of working to tight deadlines.
The most frustrating element to the job, he says, is the waiting around for athletes and interviews to happen but he has little doubt as to what he loves most about his job.
“The unexpected,” explains Coquard. “You don't know how the action is going to pan out. For example, Bogdan Bondarenko jumping 2.41m in Lausanne or Bolt's false start in Daegu. I also enjoy the urgency of working on a daily newspaper. It is an exciting feeling.”
Steve Landells for the IAAF
