2009 World Championships in Athletics

The 12th IAAF World Championships in Athletics (German: Leichtathletik-Weltmeisterschaften 2009) were held in Berlin, Germany from 15 to 23 August 2009. The majority of events took place in the Olympiastadion, while the marathon and racewalking events started and finished at the Brandenburg Gate.

Berlin was announced the winning bidder by the IAAF on 6 December 2004 beating out bids from Split (Croatia), Valencia (Spain), Brisbane (Australia), Brussels (Belgium), Delhi (India), Casablanca (Morocco) and Daegu (South Korea). The city of Berlin and the Deutscher Leichtathletik-Verband (German Athletics Association) are responsible for the organisation of the event. The Berlin Organising Committee 2009 GmbH, a corporation established by the DLV in 2005, will supervise the operative organisation of the competition.

Building upon Germany's history of successful athletics events, including the 1974 and 2006 FIFA World Cups the 1993 World Championships in Athletics, the 1936 and 1972 Summer Olympics, IAAF president Lamine Diack was confident of a well organised competition. The organizers announced a budget of €49.8 million to stage the event, which includes the travel and accommodation costs for all participating athletes. Revenues include €17 million from ticketing and €7 million from marketing.^{[citation needed]} The city of Berlin will cover a deficit up to €20 million.^{[citation needed]} The organising committee secured 9000 rooms in the city to account for accommodation, with the hope that the booking of the Hotel Estrel (950 rooms) and Hotel Berlin (650 rooms) for athletes would create an atmosphere similar to an Olympic Village.

Overall, the event was an economic success for the capital. A total of 417,156 tickets were sold over the nine-day period, and estimates placed the total visitor spend in the city at around €120 million. As a result, Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, stated that the city would consider applying to host another athletics event in the future, such as the 2016 European Athletics Championships.

A limited edition €10 coin was produced for the event by the German government, which was only the third occasion that they had done so for a sporting event. The organising committee held a contest to decide the name of its mascot, a running anthropomorphic bear, and the name "Berlino" was chosen. The colour scheme of the event, including the official logo, advertising, and the Olympiastadion's track and field, was blue and green. The committee stated that blue represented reliability while green represented the event's environmental ambitions. The event featured a number of environmentally friendly initiatives, including: free public transport with every ticket sold, efforts to reduce energy usage, considerations for waste and recycling management, and environmentally conscious construction and building management. Furthermore, as part of the United Nations Environment Programme, forty-seven trees (one for each athletics event) were planted to create an "Avenue of Champions" in Berlin. The official song for the event was "Foot of the Mountain" by Norwegian group A-ha.

The broadcasting rights for the Championships were sold to 213 countries, a new high for the event. ARD and ZDF were the host broadcasting TV networks and producers of the TV signal, and they founded a company named BERTA which provided the signal in high-resolution HDTV for TV stations around the world. The average viewing figures in Germany were 5 million with peaks of 9.9 and 8.6 million for the men's 100 metres final and the women's high jump, respectively. The average audience figures in France were 3.5–4 million, 2.5–3.5 million in the United Kingdom and 4–5 million in Japan. The IAAF website received a record number of page hits and unique users: having around 1 million unique users accessing the website on days five and six, and a total of over 90 million page views over the course of the nine days of the competition. Around 3500 media representatives were estimated to have attended the event.

To provide the public with an opportunity to participate in the event, the local organizers also conducted a Champions Run 10K on 22 August between the scheduled time for the men's and women's marathons, using a portion of the official marathon course which passes various Berlin landmarks with a finish at the Brandenburg Gate. The field was limited to 10,000 runners.

The Championships were staged in the 74,845-seat Olympiastadion, which underwent a €242 million renovation ahead of the 2006 Football World Cup. The marathon races, as well as the racewalking events, had their start and finish at the Brandenburg Gate, with the race walks routed along the Unter den Linden boulevard and the marathon passing through Pariser Platz and going past Berlin's other points of interest. An estimated 400,000 tickets were sold by the event organisers for the event. In memory of their historic Olympic achievements at the Olympiastadion in 1936, a meeting took place between the families of Luz Long and Jesse Owens. Long's long jump advice to rival Owens remains a prominent example of sportsmanship and friendship in athletics. A reward of US$100,000 was given to any athlete who broke a world record at the competition.