Athlétisme - GDF SUEZ - Meeting 2008

By a delicious twist of fate in the sporting calendar, on Friday 18th July 2008, the Meeting Gaz de France Paris Saint-Denis will celebrate its tenth consecutive year at the Stade de France. It will be an anniversary worth celebrating, less than a month before the start of the Olympic events in Beijing. At this point athletics, the primary sport of the summer Games, will grab all the public and media attention in France as well as everywhere else on the planet. In the meantime however, the party will be at the Stade de France!

Ten years. This has been a decade which has seen the Parisian event stand out as an unmissable meeting for the world’s top athletes, the signing of a contract with the Golden League and the attraction of newspapers and television channels from all around the world to the Stade de France. Added to that, the meeting managed to beat the world attendance record for a one day meeting with over 70,000 spectators.

For this grand occasion, the meeting will make the competition even more festive and prestigious than ever before. No less than ten Olympic champions, among the greatest in history, will be making the trip to Paris. Presented to the public, they will add great pomp and ceremony to the event through their presence.

On the track, the meeting promises to be a must in this Olympic season. The posters currently adorning walls in Paris and the surrounding area are announcing the perspective of long awaited duels 110m hurdles, 100m, 400m and javelin for men, 200m high jump and long jump for women.

With just four weeks then until the start of the Olympic athletics events, and just after the American trials, the Meeting Gaz de France Paris Saint-Denis is ideally placed in the sporting calendar and can claim the world’s best line-up of the moment. The top athletes will be competing at the Stade de France as they seek to check their fitness levels and assess the competition, prior to packing their bags for the Chinese capital. This will be one of their last performance before China and they will be keen to gain extra confidence and a final reference.

For the French, for whom the Meeting Gaz de France Paris Saint-Denis has always reserved at least one lane or one place in the competition, this will be a good opportunity to size each other up amongst the world’s elite, prior to the French Championship Meeting a week later in Albi. A big first: the national meeting, scheduled for the start of the programme, will also have an Olympic feel. The Direction Technique Nationale (National Technical Department) of the French Athletics Federation (FFA) has chosen it to be the reference event to make up the relay teams set to contend in the Beijing Games. A good reason for the spectators to arrive early.