Some notes from Doha:

1. A Qatar-based expatriate told me the country has adopted a Friday/Saturday weekend - halfway between the Middle Eastern and western variants.

The move is indicative of how Doha, a fast-changing city if ever there was one, has started embracing alien ideas, creating a cultural flavour that is distinctively its own.

The route between my hotel and Aspire, the host venue of the World Indoor Championships, took me past not just a Carrefour hypermarket and a Marks & Spencer, but also the Qatar Paintballing Center.

A nearby car-park was a popular site for impromptu morning cricket matches.

But traditional Arab culture is very much in evidence too.

A headscarved female guide who showed me around part of the remarkable Shafallah Center for children and young people with special needs, declined with utmost politeness to shake my hand.

I also couldn’t help but notice that all the flag-bearers in the World Indoor Championships’ opening ceremony appeared to be male.

2. My first exposure to a big indoor athletics meeting left me with mixed feelings.

On the positive side, the juxtapositions thrown together by the condensed format were often fascinating.

At one point Steve Hooker (pictured) and Blanka Vlašic were no more than a metre apart at the start of their respective run-ups for their next pole vault/high jump. 

The Croatian high jumper also went and stood right by the finish-line as the men’s 60 metres final was about to start and may have had the best view in the house of Britain’s Dwain Chambers thundering through for gold.

Jenny Meadows, meanwhile, was at the starting blocks for her 800m final while the National Anthem was playing during Chambers’s medals ceremony.

Spectators are also, of course, close to the action, making for a fine spectacle and a great atmosphere.

What I was less keen on was the way in which blocks of dead time were interspersed with bursts of everything happening at once.

The action on Sunday didn’t start until 4pm, whereupon a dizzying succession of events got under way at a rhythm that made it next to impossible to keep tabs on everything that was going on.

Saturday afternoon was just as manic, yet Friday did not bring a single final.

No doubt this choppy schedule has been carefully thought through.

But really, wouldn’t it be better to have fewer athletes and therefore fewer heats to plough through on the opening day, creating the space to enable perhaps two, rather than four, events to be going on at once?    

As it was, elite sport showed once again its stubborn refusal to be choreographed, with the event’s marquee moment - Teddy Tamgho’s indoor world record triple jump of 17.90 metres - delayed until the penultimate act of the very last event, when things were very much winding down.

3. Usain Bolt did not take part in the World Indoor Championships.

Yet the Jamaican sprinter was granted a few sentences in the official programme, across the page from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) top brass Lamine Diack, Sergey Bubka and Sebastian Coe.

This fixed a thought in my mind: much as the IAAF, I’m sure, is grateful to have him, it needs Bolt at the moment more than he needs them.

You only have to look at the impact the man from Trelawny had on viewing figures for last year’s World Championships in Berlin.

A survey of the most-watched TV sporting events of 2009 suggested that not far off 100 million people saw the men’s 100m final in which he lowered the world record to an other-worldly 9.58sec.

This was far above the 70 million total audience that watched the equivalent event in 2007 in Osaka and took the event to within striking distance of the top three sporting spectacles of the year.

I don’t know what sort of global viewing numbers Doha’s Bolt-less World Indoor Championships attracted at the weekend.

But I’d be very interested to compare them with the audience for Sunday’s Formula One grand prix in nearby Bahrain.

4. Just inside the Aspire complex, where the World Indoor Championships was taking place, is a wall-mounted feature incorporating many famous signatures.

Alex Ferguson, Clarence Seedorf, Ronaldinho…You get the idea.

In only two cases, so far as I could see, had it been felt necessary to add an explanation of who the signatory was.

One of these, I think, was the head of some Zimbabwean sports federation; the other was Frederick, Crown Prince of Denmark.

Easy to see who today’s true rulers are.

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics. An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938