SPORT EUROPEAN INDOOR ATHLETICS CHAMPIONSHIPS
After a 40-year absence Glasgow will again host Europe’s biggest indoor athletics meeting. And just maybe it was the bagpipes that won it for the city.
How the skirl of the pipes played a part in Glasgow’s successful bid to host the European Indoor Athletics Championships
BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN G
lasgow has a long his- tory of hosting sporting spectacles and thanks to the work of a dedicated team of professionals at
EventScotland, it is set to stage yet another. Te European Indoor Athletics
Championships will return to the city in 2019 after a near 40-year absence, in no small part thanks to the skills of an amateur athlete- cum-piper. Tasked with impressing a high-
ranking athletics committee in Lau- sanne in Switzerland (where the bid was officially submitted in January this year) and again in Amsterdam for the follow-up pitch to judges in April, EventScotland, working with UK Athletics, decided the skirl of
the bagpipes was the perfect anti- dote to the rather staid format of a boardroom presentation. “It added a really great little flour-
ish to the bid,” explains Rhona Corscadden, who was part of the official delegation that travelled to both the high (think Alps) and low (think polders) countries. “We thought it would be nice to
bring in a piper, just to do some- thing different,” adds Corscadden, a senior events manager at EventScot- land. “We approached Scottish Athletics to see if any of our athletes could play the pipes and luckily they found one. So Michael Fernie, a 400m runner, piped the bid into the office in Lausanne – the guys over there were all delighted with that.” Whether, in fact, the office-
dwelling executives of the European Athletic Association were actually expecting anyone at all, when the 100-page-plus document could have simply been posted to its Swiss HQ, is another matter. But any com- plaints about superfluous spend should probably remain unsaid, given Glasgow won the rights to stage the competition at the Emir- ates Arena in three years’ time. “We
20 | EVENTSBASE | SUMMER 2016
didn’t see anyone else [rival nations] when we were there,” says Corscad- den. “Maybe they did just post them. We thought it would be good to travel over.”
AFTER AN evaluation visit by judges to Glasgow in February, to inspect the venue, hotels, warm-up facilities and, perhaps unneces- sarily, “various restaurants”, the coup de grace was delivered at the 15-minute pitch in Amsterdam in April (supported, once again, by Fernie and his pipes). “We were first up and the other
countries waiting in the foyer must have seen and heard our piper, who was very noisy,” Corscadden added. Te pitch itself, which scandalously overran by a whole minute, had been meticulously rehearsed by the
six-man team, which included re- tired European indoor 60m cham- pion Jason Gardener (now president of UK Athletics), ex-400m runner Donna Fraser and teenage sprint prospect Finette Agyapong, who struck up an immediate rapport with the Romanian member of the Association’s council, former athlete Gabriela Szabo. “You could just see her connect-
ing to the young athlete – it was a really nice moment,” said Corscad- den, who then had to wait ner- vously with her colleagues whilst the rival bids from Minsk (Belarus), Torun (Poland) and Apeldoorn (Netherlands), went ahead. Tank- fully, around two hours later, the team were called back in front of Svein Arne Hansen, President of the European Athletic Association,
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