World Relays: The muted preps

An acceptable definition for a relay is a race where one person hands over a stick to the next person and hope they don’t drop it while sprinting at full speed. When a country hosts an event like this you expect there’ll be a whole lot of noise to let people know and spread the message of the event. You expect the hype machine to crank up to full volume—billboards, jingles, mascots doing backflips in shopping malls. Instead, sometimes it feels like the baton gets passed more quietly than a library handoff.

Some rumour mongers have confirmed the noise budget has been spent entirely on one guy with a vuvuzela. The noise has come from the people who should be the receiver of the noise in the first place – spectators.