News03 Sep 2009


Words from the Meeting Director - Zürich

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Zürich - Patrick K. Magyar (© c)

The man who runs the world-famous Weltklasse Zürich meeting is on mission. Patrick Magyar wants to talk about energy.

Not expending it like most of his contracted athletes will do on the night of the event but, rather, saving it.

With Switzerland the centre of many environmental initiatives, with the ultimate target of making the world a better place to live, Magyar has committed his event to having a carbon neutral footprint.

Social service

“For us, as an organisation, it is a huge effort. We consider ourselves as one of the leading sporting events in Switzerland and we taken very seriously our social responsibility with regards to supporting the sport towards children, young adults, and towards making our sport popular but we also believe we have an important role towards society in general,” commented Magyar.

“In the last three years, we have worked towards getting a carbon neutral footprint for the Weltklasse Zürich. To be honest, a lot of that has become possible with the change from the old stadium to the new stadium (which was built alongside the old Letzigrund arena and staged its first meeting in 2007), we have worked quite hard in this respect.

“One example of this is that before the meeting we are going to bring all the athletes, with public transportation, the tramways, from here in the meeting hotel to the stadium.”

“It is also a symbol for our efforts to encourage people to also take the tramway to the stadium and not come by car,” he added.

Magyar admits that he could not have made as much progress in making the Weltklasse Zürich arguably the most environmentally-friendly athletics meeting in the world without the extensive support of his local partner Erdgas.

Sponsor support

“We have been cooperating extensively on these things with our sponsor Erdgas, it was very important for us to have a partner that was knowledgeable in these energy topics, especially as the analysis we did showed the largest carbon (emission) factor relating to this meeting is athletes' and spectators' transportation.

“Following on from this, one of the elements we have pushed very hard on is that we have tried co-operate with the public transportation system in Zürich so that stadium entry tickets are at the same time also free tickets for the public transport system around Zürich.

“In addition, we also have a stadium whose electricity fully run from solar power, as well as wood pellet boilers and bio-gas powered trucks. So we are not thinking not just about compensating for the CO2 but also developing a behaviour that is complimentary to this.

Also, with Erdgas, we have selected our project for our 2009 CO2 compensation and it's a bio-gas project in Thailand.

Meeting of minds

Magyar has been trying to persuade his fellow ÅF Golden League meeting directors to follow in his footsteps and next year will try to increase the pressure on his counterparts outside Europe when the Diamond League comes into being.

He admits that he has had mixed success so far with some meetings mirroring his initiatives while others are falling short of his high expectations.

“This why we want to be a role model to other meetings, we try to have a quality of behaviour in everything we do. If we stand still we will not be able to improve.

“We (in Zürich) would like to be a leader in these issues. I think we are the first major athletics event in the world which is trying to achieve what we are doing. But it is possible here because we have a new stadium which was designed from the outset to sustain an ecological point of view

“If we had the old stadium we might have had more trouble trying to achieve these aims but, in general, I believe all major sports events should try follow such an initiative as ours,” commented Magyar.

“We are all trying to emotionally grasp spectators all over the world and so if we (as meeting organisers) can be a role model for this sort of behaviour, then we should try to do this.

“There are already some meetings that are doing a lot of these initiatives,  Stockholm is a good example. We are also currently working together with two other meetings, I'm not going to say who they are because there are also negotiations with a sponsor, so that we can continue in the direction we are going.”

Magyar might make an unlikely looking eco-warrior but, especially as the Weltklasse Zürich meeting has historically been at the forefront of so many initiatives in athletics, going ever-greener can only be a good thing.

Phil Minshull for the IAAF

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