São Paulo – Qatar will host the World Athletics Championships to start on Friday (27). Competitions will take place at the country’s capital city, Doha. The event runs until October 6 and overall prize purse exceeds USD 7 million for the athletes who win the medals (pictured) and hit records during the championships.
The host venue will be Khalifa International Stadium, which was built in 1976. The country made a renovation on the venue to host the 2022 World Cup. It invested USD 72 million, and the 40,000-seater is fully air-conditioned.
“They used all this money to enable the competition and, having soccer on mind, created a very special cooling system. Just now, it was 40°C outside, while the stadium barely registered 20°C. They built a ventilated tunnel to take athletes straight from the warm-up course to the stadium. They’ve invested a lot in athletics for a while,” Brazilian Olympics Committee (COB) coach Carlos Alberto Cavalheiro was quoted as saying in a press release by the Brazilian Confederation of Athletics (CBAt). Cavalheiro worked in Qatar for 10 years.
Athletes from Brazil
Brazil is sending 44 athletes to compete. They include shot put athletes such as Darlan Romani (who won the gold medal on this year’s Pan American Games and is second place in the world ranking of the International Association of Athletics Federations), racewalker Caio Bonfim (who won a bronze medal in the 2017 World Championship in the UK) and sprinter Paulo André (world champion in Japan 2019 with the 4 x 100 meters relay team).
CBAt reported this Wednesday (25) that out of the 44 athletes called, 34 were already training in Qatar’s capital city.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
