2014 IAAF World Indoor Championships
| 15th IAAF World Indoor Championships | |
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Official competition logo
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| Host city | Sopot, Poland |
| Date(s) | 7–9 March |
| Main stadium | Ergo Arena |
| Participation | 538 athletes from 134 nations |
| Events | 26 |
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The 2014 IAAF World Indoor Championships in Athletics was the fifteenth edition of the international indoor track and field competition, organised by the IAAF. The event was held between 7–9 March 2014 at the Ergo Arena in Sopot, Poland.
The IAAF announced on 1 September 2011 that it had received bids from Poland and Croatia to host the championships. Later Zagreb, Croatia withdrew due to lack of funding. On November 11, 2011 at a Council meeting in Monaco, the IAAF announced that Sopot, as the only remaining bidder, would host the championships. Budapest, Hungary had shown interest but eventually did not bid.
The Championships were held at the Ergo Arena, opened in 2010, on the border of the cities of Sopot and Gdańsk. For the Championships it seated 11,000.
For the competition a six-lane, banked 200-metre oval, with a blue surface, was installed on the arena floor, with an eight-lane straight-away track in the center for the 60-metre sprints and hurdles. The track officially opened on 16 February and almost 6000 people came to the ERGO Arena to mark its inauguration. The indoor portable banked track made by Mondo used the company's "Super X" rubberized surface (two layers, total 13.5 mm thick), which was used at both the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics. After the competition the track has been dismantled and moved permanently to the newly built indoor arena in Toruń.
The IAAF again chose not to get wide coverage in the large United States market. Instead they sold exclusive rights to Universal Sports, a network associated with NBC Sports. Universal Sports can only be seen in about ten percent of the households in the American market. Universal Sports limited other distribution of the content, even online content requiring login with cable subscription user names. For those viewers without access to Universal Sports, nationwide coverage of the entire meet was blacked out. IAAF supported the blackout of coverage. Unlike previous World Championship meetings, IAAF's YouTube channel provided only post race interviews and no coverage of the actual events at the meet.
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