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Lolo Jones
Lolo Jones, right, featured in the current edition of Spikes magazine, is beaten by Canada's Priscilla Lopes-Schliep in the women's 100m hurdles at Crystal Palace. Photograph: Tom Hevezi/AP
Lolo Jones, right, featured in the current edition of Spikes magazine, is beaten by Canada's Priscilla Lopes-Schliep in the women's 100m hurdles at Crystal Palace. Photograph: Tom Hevezi/AP

Review: Spikes magazine breathes new life into athletics

This article is more than 13 years old
The IAAF's magazine is just what the sport needs: it's entertaining, enlightening and doesn't cost a bean

There's a pleasing elegance to the way athletics magazine Spikes approaches its task that separates it from the Sturm und Drang of football's glossier, louder reads, and balances perfectly with the subject matter. It's an elegance that belies the skill and, with London 2012 looming, vision of its creation. And the fact it remains a relatively undiscovered treat only adds to the allure.

Spikes was launched in the summer of 2008 and is funded by the International Association of Athletics Federations, with a simple remit: to raise interest in athletics, especially among young people. The IAAF identified the key factors that they felt were contributing to a decline in the sport's popularity – the drugs issue, a lack of TV coverage and lack of UK success – and, unusually for a governing body, set about addressing it by setting some proper, low-key but long-term goals. There's nothing dramatic about launching an athletics magazine, but, with Spikes, they might actually succeed.

There is some genuinely clever thinking behind the project. The first good decision was making it free of charge. Running to between 60 and 70 pages, and printed on good, heavy paper, that's an attention-grabber in itself. Next, despite the IAAF providing the funding, its editorial staff at publishers Haymarket are free to cover what they see fit. As a result, this is no mouthpiece for the board, nor a dry, trade letter – raising the profile was the goal and they have been left alone to achieve it.

And the final, most important reason it works – the content. Recognising that, to interest the youth market, identification with the subject is key, Spikes sets about telling the stories behind the athletes. So while there are pieces on how to beat the world's best sprinters, nostalgia from classic events and investigative debates (this edition: 'Which direction should the sport take in future' – with John Inverdale and a host of athletes throwing in opinions) mostly it tells readers about the athletes themselves. It's a lot easier to care about a sport if you care about the people involved, after all.

Among the bigger pieces in this issue are features on American hurdler Lolo Jones – open and honest about her tough upbringing and the crushing disappointment of falling at the penultimate hurdle in Beijing – distance runner Joseph Ebuya, on how his childhood in the drought-ridden north of Kenya feeds his determination to succeed, and high jumper Blanka Vasic, who allows her dreams to be interpreted for signs of subconscious greatness.

There's human interest, too, brilliantly evidenced in the first issue's The Day I Beat... which tracked down and interviewed five young athletes who beat top international stars before drifting into relative obscurity. Among them Kirk Dumpleton, who, aged 16 in 1972, became the only British athlete to defeat Seb Coe and Steve Ovett in the same race. The magazine is also packed with fun. Q and As, light-hearted news and a healthy youth-friendly cross-over with pop and celebrity culture – Cuban athletes training with hand grenades, Olympic champion javelin thrower Barbora Spotakova's punk rock fan club and the running styles of Sporty Spice and Natalie Imbruglia.

So far Spikes has been published between two and three times a year, with subscriptions of 12,500, although this year it's also being issued in Germany, Russia and the USA – reaching around 300,000 people. There will be no better platform for the sport than the 2012 Olympic Games in London and anyone, particularly kids, who wants to really engage with athletics as the excitement begins to grow cannot go wrong with Spikes. It's just what athletics needs: entertaining and enlightening – and it doesn't cost a bean.

Observer readers who subscribe now at spikesmag.com will receive the latest issue, and all future editions, of Spikes.

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