Mondo has provided the main athletics and warm up athletics tracks for 13 of the previous 18 World Athletics Indoor Championships, as well as the inaugural World Indoor Games back in 1985, the forerunner to the biennial event which is now the most important athletics meeting in the world.
No less than 28 world indoor records (with indoor marks being officially ratified as records since1987) have been set on Mondo tracks at these championships over the last 37 years.
Will there be new additions to the annals of athletics history at this year’s championships?
The Scottish city’s Emirates Arena has a recently installed Sportflex Super X 720 athletics track which will provide the very best environment for more than 600 athletes to perform at the very highest level and follow in the footsteps of the icons of the sport who have excelled at the championships.
Here are our Top 10 Mondo Magic Moments from those 13 World Athletics Indoor Championships and there is more to savour than just world records.
The first official World Athletics Indoor Championships was in Indianapolis, USA and the famous Hoosier Dome witnessed five world indoor records. The pick of them was Stefka Kostadinova’s high jump record on the final day, the Bulgarian clearing 2.05m.
At the 1991 edition in the Spanish city of Sevilla, the quartet of Rico Lieder, Jens Carlowitz, Karsten Just and Thomas Schönlebe from the newly unified Germany took more than two seconds off the world indoor record with a time of 3:03.05.
In 1993, USA’s reigning world outdoors champion in the decathlon Dan O’Brien achieved indoor success and superlatives in Toronto, Canada when he tallied 6476 points in the heptathlon, a world record that was to stand until 2010.
Morocco’s Hicham El Guerrouj was a surprise winner at the 1995 championships in Barcelona but took the first global title of what was to be an illustrious career with a super-quick last lap to win the 1500m gold medal.
Denmark’s Wilson Kipketer produced one of the most talked about feats of any World Athletics Indoor Championships at Paris 1997 when he front-ran his way to an 800m world record of 1:43.96 in his heat and then improved further by over a second when he clocked a stunning 1:42.67 in the final.
The World Athletics Indoor Championships Maebashi 1999 saw two world indoor records in both the men’s and women’s 4x400m but perhaps the individual performance of the meeting in the Japanese city’s Green Dome came from Namibia’s Frankie Fredericks who won the 200m in 20.10, the second fastest time ever indoors.
Cuban long jumper Ivan Pedroso became the first, and to date only, athlete to win five successive World Athletics Indoor Championships titles with his effort of 8.43m at Lisbon 2001. Pedroso still holds the long jump championship record with 8.62m in Maebashi two years earlier.
Teddy Tamgho got the first of his three-world indoor triple jump records when he bounded out to 17.90m at the World Athletics Indoor Championships Doha 2010, the Frenchman winning the very last event of the championships in spectacular fashion.
Ukraine’s combined events exponent Natalia Dobrynska became the first athlete to break the 5000 points barrier for the pentathlon when she finished with a world indoor record of 5013 points at the 2012 championships in Istanbul, a mark that lasted until 2023.
Poland’s 4x400m quartet caused one of the biggest upsets ever at a World Athletics Indoor Championships when they beat the highly favoured USA team at the 2018 championships in Birmingham, Great Britain with a world record of 3:01.77.