When simply getting out of Baku airport alive feels like such a relief – after missing your flight connection, losing your luggage, misplacing your visa letter, and eventually buying your way through – then there’s only one way to hit the ground. And that’s on your hands and knees.
“Baku has that wow factor,” Pierce O’Callaghan had warned me, and he should know. For the past two years, Baku has been home for the former Irish international walker, who has had the unenviable task of organising the 20 sporting events that make up these inaugural European Games.
“Wow, that is a dry heat,” is my first impression, after crawling onto the media shuttle bus that finally completes my two-day journey into the heart of Azerbaijan. It wasn’t entirely the fault of Turkish Airlines that this journey included an overnight stay on the floor of Istanbul airport, although they did their best to ensure it was an unforgettable one.
From the airport, the road into Baku quickly opens into a free-flowing five-lane highway, neatly landscaped on either side with freshly planted green conifers and blue cedars.
This may be the carefully staged ‘wow’ into the city, although there is no disguising the fact Azerbaijan is transforming itself at breakneck speed, and is simply taking sporting events like this one along for the ride.
Off in the hilly distance, there appears to be clusters of less inviting habitats, but otherwise the city is gleaming under the big hard sun, alongside the shining Caspian Sea. The most recently completed jewel in this city landscape soon appears, the Baku Olympic Stadium, just a few metres off the highway, standing in spectacular isolation, as if already a monument to itself.
This 68,700-all seater, completed in March at a cost of €540 million, staged last Friday’s opening ceremony (that in itself costing a tidy €85 million), yet will remain strangely idle for all but two of the 16 days of competition: even if it’s too early to tell whether or not these games have a lasting future, no one can deny that without a proper athletics competition, they will never completely take off.
Instead, next Sunday and Monday Baku’s Olympic Stadium will host division four of the already peripheral European Team Championships, where Azerbaijan will compete against the other great minnows of track and field, such as Armenia, Andorra, Malta, Moldova and FYR Macedonia. It will be one of the great non-events of the sporting year.
That’s a pity, because leaving aside the country’s motivation for staging these games and the backdrop of continuing repression against anyone who speaks out against the government’s flood of oil and gas money that is effectively running the entire show, Baku appears to be a fine location for a sporting event of this scale.
Little dusty
The other pity is that the games already feel so dwarfed by the scale of their own ambition: the media village consists of four 14-storey towers, a little dusty from their recent construction, yet palatial in space and efficiency, with at least four volunteers for every journalist. Next to us are the four towers of the athletes village, again works of luxury rather than immediate necessity.
“As a young and newly independent country, shaking off the shackles of Soviet rule for 80 years, experience at organising major multi-sport events was scarce,” O’Callaghan told me, which is why Baku out-sourced so many of the organisational positions to people like him.
O'Callaghan worked for four years with the European Athletics Federation, and also served as a technical official at the last two Olympics, in Beijing and London. Pat Hickey, president of the European Olympic Committee (EOC), first asked O'Callaghan to come on board with the EOC working group, which looked into the feasibility of staging a European Games. Then, when it came to fulfilling the role of director of sports for Baku 2015, up stepped O'Callaghan again. He is currently the busiest man in Baku.
“The decision was made to hire international expertise at all senior levels, with a view to leaving a legacy and training local staff for future events in Azerbaijan. This has been a successful strategy, which resulted in no time wasted over the life of the project.
First edition
“My role was to meet and engage all the European federations and hopefully negotiate their entry onto the sports programme for the first edition of the European Games. It wasn’t an easy task, there was no shortage of naysayers but I believed in Pat’s vision and his conviction to carry it through.”
For now, however, that might actually have been the easy part, because as the city of Baku is clearly doing a wonderful job of wowing itself with these European Games, it appears the wow factor hasn’t yet spread very far beyond Azerbaijan. Which might also explain, as rumour now has it, why these games might well be back in Baku again in 2019.
