Marketing big events like World Athletics Championships has created ever more sporting spectators but is it increasing participati

We expected vast attendances at the weekends when Usain Bolt and Mo Farah were putting in their final track performances, but in between times, through the working week, they kept pouring through the gates, more than 700,000 spectators in all in the course of 10 days of compelling action.

Such were the incidents, issue and at times even intrigue, they got their money’s worth, with genuine global greats, also including Allyson Felix and Wayde van Niekerk, in action every night, but as uplifting as much of it was it played to a theme I was asked to address earlier this summer.

In the event it was an invitation I had to turn down because of a date clash, but it had been extended by the president of a rugby club who wanted me to examine his hypothesis that we are going through a process of turning sports that were formerly largely about participation into spectator sports.

Just as rugby has become increasingly like American Football in that regard, while our national sport of football has also seen a chasm develop between what is designed for spectators and the game most people play, so at what is now West Ham United’s home ground it felt, during the World Championships, as if something similar has been happening in athletics with all the effort piled into putting on a show and getting bums on seats, rather than feet on tracks and pitches.

‘If you build it they will come,’ rang the ‘Field of Dreams’ movie legend, but even in that heart-warming fairytale the battle was between the purity of the main character’s motives and those seeking to find the most effective way of making as much money as possible from the land.

In essence this is all part of the discussion about this abused word ‘legacy’ that has been used to justify huge public expenditure on staging sports events and in pursuing gold, silver and bronzeware, the argument being that we are inspiring future generations.

Heading late into the penultimate evening at the Olympic Stadium there was, however, an ever stronger case to be made that what we are inspiring them to do is watch rather than play with, in stark contrast to what we had hoped would be happening by now, just one British athlete, a man who was on the point of retiring from the track, picking up an individual medal in the course of the championships and by his dizzying standards even Mo Farah under-performed by winning ‘only’ one gold medal.

It was apt, then, that Scottish Athletics could lay some claim to the man who turned things around, their former head of coaching Stephen Maguire having overseen the full set of relay medals, a gold, two silver and a bronze, that lifted the host nation to sixth place from outside the top 10 on the table.

More important than that, however, was the presence of a record sized Scottish contingent produced by a governing body that for many of us has become an exemplar of the right way to develop sport, by placing the emphasis on participation. They did not come home with a bag full of medals this time, but probably will from the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast. Most encouraging of all is that the men behind the policies that are allowing Scottish Athletics to show the rest of the UK how it should be done are in ever more important roles.

Mark Munro was promoted to chief executive last year having previously been head of development. That promotion came when his former boss Nigel Holl was appointed head of strategy for British Athletics. They seem to be the sort of individuals who can properly capitalise on events like those tumultuous World Championships and use them to best effect as it becomes ever more important that we understand just what sort of behaviours we are seeking to inspire.