Press conferences held on the eve of sporting events tend towards the anodyne - unless, of course, you get the likes of Jose Mourinho or Sir Alex Ferguson laying their snares for officials or rival managers, wily as poachers.

No such subterfuge was in evidence here in Doha, where the media event heralding the opening IAAF Samsung Diamond League meeting of the season tomorrow involved a batch of game, if vague, athletes, and officials including the IAAF President Lamine Diack and his counterpart within Qatar athletics, Abdullah Al Zaini.

As such, the event offered a glimpse of the difficulties involved in trying to organise sporting events in an increasingly busy and disparate environment.

The latest version of an athletics grand prix, now officially broadened to include the United States, Asia and the Arab world, was inaugurated last year, and it proved broadly successful, not least because of the eruptions of excitement that are always possible in sport.

Who would have predicted, for instance, that 21-year-old Kenyan Silas Kiplagat would mark his first major 1500 metres, at the Monaco Diamond League, by running it in 3min 29.27sec, putting himself in the all-time top 10?

Who would have predicted - before the season started, at least - that Tyson Gay would beat Usain Bolt over 100 metres, as he did at the Stockholm Diamond League?

And who could have foreseen the intensity of struggle down the home straight of the Bislett Stadium as world indoor 800m champion Abubaker Kaki, teeth bared with effort, tried all he knew to pass the gazelle-like Kenyan David Rudisha, who was to end the season as world record holder, only to find the task narrowly beyond him?

If you bring athletes together often enough, these things will happen. But the best efforts of meeting organisers to ensure that the best turn up to face the best are so often fraught by the same old circumstances.

Athletes don't always fancy facing each other. And athletes get injured – as we saw this week when the projected re-run of last year's Oslo Diamond League epic between Kaki and Rudisha came to grief because of two, thankfully, minor injuries.


Kaki's coach, Jama Aden, assured me today that his runner had suffered an untimely cramp in training, and that he only needed to back off for a few days to be back on track for the season. "He is going really, really well," Aden added.

The athletics world looks forward to the next meeting between these two contrasting talents – although it doesn't now look like happening soon.

Is this a bad thing? Well, yes and no.

While the absence of an Olympics or a World Championship last year meant the Diamond League had an untrammelled season to itself, the dynamic this year, with the Worlds in Daegu looming up in August, is very different.

"It will be more difficult this year," Diack said, adding that it would not be realistic, for instance, to foresee to see three or four meetings between Gay and Bolt. 

"Don't expect that," he added. "That could diminish the value of the World Championships. Maybe they will meet just once before then. We will see."

The fit between a series of one-day meetings and major championships will always be an awkward one, not least because the aspirations involved are different.

For instance, Allyson Felix went all out for a unique Diamond League double last season, over 200 and 400 metres, and achieved it. This year she is boxing clever, and - quite sensibly - shying away from committing herself to the same process.

World Championships and Olympics dominate considerations for any serious elite performer, and quite rightly so. Athletics is an individual sport, and while a series of sparkling rivalries exhibited throughout the summer would delight meeting organisers and spectators alike, there will not be such a bonanza in prospect.

It's a difficult balancing act, however, as the sport needs to promote itself over the course of each year if it is to keep interest and expectation high ahead of its blue riband events.

Pierre Weiss, the IAAF general secretary, announced that the organisers of the Zurich Diamond League meeting which falls on September 8, just four days after the World Championships, had already chartered a dedicated flight to transport more than 100 elite athletes straight over to Switzerland to recuperate and prepare.

There has been an additional local difficulty with the impending Diamond League season-opener, however - namely a clash with the long-established meeting in Kingston, Jamaica the following day, which the IAAF has just upgraded to the status of a World Challenge event.

"Not good," admitted Weiss. "Next year we hope not to have this issue," commented Diack.

It will, doubtless, be sorted forthwith. But the continuing tension between athletes' ambitions and the need to promote the sport is not such an easy thing to fix.

Mike Rowbottom, one of Britain's most talented sportswriters, has covered the last five Summer and four Winter Olympics for The Independent. Previously he has worked for the Daily Mail, The Times, The Observer, the Sunday Correspondent and The Guardian. He is now chief feature writer for insidethegames and is in Doha covering the opening Diamond League meeting of the new season