LEONID ANDRONOV/SHUTTERSTOCK

Iwonder if there will be crowds. The race doesn’t begin until midnight but, given how Doha’s malls and coffee shops are always busy through to the early hours, that shouldn’t be a discouragement. I walk the final 500 metres to the Corniche. When I arrive, I’m disappointed to find only small gaggles of people, including two men, a group of 20 or so Sri Lankans and three African men musing on the weather.

The Pearl in Doha, Qatar is an artificial island spanning nearly four square kilometres. It is one of the largest realestate developments in the Gulf, home to high-end luxury accommodation and entertainment venues

It is September 2019, and the start of the IAAF World Athletics Championships – the biggest global occasion for track and field after the Olympics. Qatar is the host, the contest meant to serve as yet another opportunity to burnish the county’s sporting credentials. Today’s other events took place in the air-conditioned Khalifa International Stadium. Climatecontrolled, open-air arenas are one of Qatar’s innovations, developed in part to counter the fact that summer temperatures would be unbearable for World Cup footballers (and then FIFA moved the World Cup to the winter anyway). It was around 23°C in the stadium – not exactly an icebox but cool enough to forget the mean, relentless humidity of a September in Doha. With its 42 kilometres of racing, however, the marathon race can’t take place in a stadium. And so I am here, gone midnight, watching it on a specially devised course on the Corniche – a large seven-kilometre loop from the harbour to the Sheraton hotel and back that the athletes must complete six times. Organisers moved the marathon to night-time to try to capitalise on Doha at its coolest. But the heat is still oppressive – it is 30-something degrees and so humid that my short walk has covered me in sweat. I have arrived just in time to see the first runners pour past in what to me looks more like a sprint than longdistance pace.

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