In addition to the GNR's ability to create more than hundreds of thousands of heroes, the organisers share with 2012 a passion to exploit the event's cultural and educational potential. The GNR's Cultural Programme is growing and maturing with every outing. This year they premiered "The Great Sports Dance". Choreographer Neville Campbell brought together a couple of hundred bodies of assorted sizes, ages and passions on to the Gateshead Quayside early on Saturday morning for a performance which is best described as a marriage between sports training and contemporary dance. As with most good ideas, this is a simple one. Neville induces sports people, those with an interest in culture and the arts and those who've never exercised or danced in their lives before and builds a complex dance piece out of sports training regimes. Its very simplicity allied to the clear exhilaration of those who performed means this must have potential to roll out more widely.
Staring down on the performers were huge photographic portraits hung in the windows of the Sage Gateshead Arts Centre. Beat Streuli's intense studies of elite runners gives real insight into the sport and art of top class athletes.
But there are other, less curated, demonstrations of the unique culture of the Great North Run to be found out on the course. The ordinary families on the outside of Gateshead who, year after year, stand outside their houses with bowls of sliced oranges for runners. Or there's the man who always erects his garden hose on a ramshackle gantry (somewhere near the hill at eleven miles as I recall) to refresh the parts that the energy drinks can't reach. And best of all is the small group who, just after a water station, set up a tressle table, cover it with paper cups and shout "ay lads – take the taste away – stop for a beer!".
As we move towards 2012, the GNR is another inspiring demonstration that elite sport, mass participation and cultural expression are happy bedfellows – each bringing something special to a rather wonderful shared party.
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