As any international athletics meeting promoter will tell you, you can't guarantee excitement. All you can do is assemble the best elements you can lay your hands on and hope the desired chemical reaction will occur.

Sometimes the very finest performers merely tick the box. Or it rains. Or things go unexpectedly wrong - as they did at the end of last Friday's Samsung Diamond League meeting in Paris, where a persistent problem with the starting equipment left a 200 metres field which included world record holder Usain Bolt fidgeting back and forth to its blocks as a mild evening turned cool.

The fact that Bolt, as he subsequently revealed, was suffering from what he described as "a flu" only made it more unfortunate.

The Diamond League meeting which followed Paris, in Birmingham, was not without flaw itself, although the hold ups to its climactic 100m event were brought about through events that fell within the competitive field as one runner was disqualified and there was another generally faulty start before Asafa Powell produced the kind of mid-race surge which will surely give him at least a fighting chance against his Jamaican friend and rival Bolt in this year's World Championships final.


That's if both men reach the final. And of course, that's if Powell brings his A game to the big occasion, as he often hasn't.

In a season which is already over, almost before it has begun, for the last man to defeat Bolt - Tyson Gay is recuperating from a hip operation which means he will not compete again until 2012 - it is sensible to remember that even the best laid plans can go awry, and that some plans don't even get a chance to be properly laid.

Such is the uncertainty of sport, without which the whole moving spectacle would be profoundly diminished.

But as he relaxed in the meeting hotel bar last Sunday night, Birmingham's meeting organiser Ian Stewart looked understandably happy with life. It had been one of those athletics occasions which just takes off.

Of course, it always helps if the home crowd have a home victory or two to cheer, which they did here on the track through two of Britain's European champions - 400m hurdler Dai Greene, and 5,000m runner Mo Farah.

But it was the audacious nature of those two victories, and others such as Sally Pearson's Oceania Area record under maximum pressure in the 100m hurdles, and Blanka Vlašić's exuberant success in the high jump which set her back on course for the World Championships following heavy defeat at her previous Diamond League meeting in Lausanne, which generated unmistakeable excitement.


And that excitement reverberated as never before in a stadium which had just opened its imposing back-straight stand, which has replaced what was for so many years a grassy bank which would sometimes have temporary seating arranged upon it.

Well might the double Olympic champion Lord Coe, whose memories of this stadium will never be entirely fond given his traumatic failure in the trials held there before the Seoul Games of 1988, have praised Birmingham City Council's achievement in creating what he described as "a world class facility".

For many present - given that the other British Diamond League meeting apart from London took place in Gateshead last season - this was the first real glimpse of the spaceship-like presence across the infield which, it has just been confirmed, will become Planet Earth for UK Athletics when the national governing body shifts across the city from Solihull in October.


The presence of a serious section of the crowd bang in front of the pole vault runway, where Blackburn's 19-year-old record breaker Holly Bleasdale came so close to earning what would have been the first Diamond League - or indeed Golden League - victory for a female British field athlete - increased the atmosphere exponentially.

What was most thrillingly in evidence on Sunday night was ambition - tangible, in the shape of the stadium which demonstrates the commitment of a council that has also arranged to host the US team for their pre-Olympic preparations next year, understood, in the case of Farah, Greene, Pearson, Vlašić et al.

As far as the tangible ambition was concerned, inevitably, questions are now being asked in council about how best to earn money back from this £12.5 million ($20.2 million) investment. But the fact that UKA has elected to settle itself there rather than seeking a place in the Olympic Stadium in Stratford says much for the validity of the Second City's sporting aspirations.

All told, the Alexander Stadium provided an evening of athletics which made sense of the sport.

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. Rowbottom's Twitter feed can be accessed here.